Pedal to the Metal

Evan didn’t feel good. Not physically--at least, that wasn’t what was bothering him. He was still a little sore from the end result of his fight with Moreno, which was new, though he put it down to being the hardest he’d ‘died’ so far. In the two days since he’d broken nearly every bone in his body, the pain had steadily receded; in a day, he estimated, it would be nothing but an unpleasant memory.

An unpleasant memory was the source of his unease, actually. While he’d been lying on the pavement, groan-screaming as his spinal cord knitted itself back together, he’d watched Titus cut an ear off Moreno’s mangled corpse, sprinkle the body with a blue substance he’d called “barghest powder”, and with a muttered word, set the whole thing alight with an eerily silent, heatless gray flame. In less than a minute, the body was reduced to a pile of ash and blackened bones, which Titus brushed and stomped down a nearby sewer drain, respectively.

He’d killed Moreno and Titus had literally thrown him away. Over the two days since then, Titus had made a concerted effort to assure Evan that Moreno had deserved worse than he’d got. And Evan was trying to make peace with the idea that he was going to run into people who there wouldn’t be any ‘normal’ way of dealing with; even if he’d somehow subdued Moreno and handed him over to the authorities (and convinced them to arrest him, though that probably wouldn’t have been too hard; his search for information on Moreno had turned up a laundry list of warrants), it would be child’s play for Moreno to break out of captivity once he’d recovered his strength. As it stood, probably the only way to mitigate the harm someone like Moreno could cause was to take him off the board permanently.

Evan accepted that, as things stood, the only way he could effectively neutralize a sadistic sociopath with supernatural capabilities was to kill them. He just wasn’t particularly happy about it.

To that end of “making it easier to kill things/people with superpowers”, he’d tried to recreate the huge punch he’d used to mangle Moreno, but nothing had come of it. Evan figured that it had to be tied to the memory of his boxing match, but no matter how hard he concentrated on that day, he couldn’t pull it off. Maybe it had to do with the source of the pain? Maybe he wasn’t getting close enough to death? Maybe it had to be used against the source of the pain, as opposed to random trees that happened nearby? There were too many variables, and Titus had started to complain about the amount of bullets the experiment was wasting, so Evan had decided to move on to Plan B: better weapons.

To that end, he’d decided to rebuilt the MANUS and give it an upgrade; to that end, they had made a detour to a salvage yard. And now Evan was covered in mud up to his knees, crawling and climbing around piles of barely-useful scrap metal and discarded appliances, searching for... well, he had ideas, and he was pretty sure he’d know when he saw something that was useful to him. Those mechanical engineering classes weren’t that long ago, after all.

Unfortunately, such an intuition-based method of searching didn’t lend itself well to collaboration, which meant Evan was wading through (and, with frustrating regularity, falling into) the mud in the baking sun while Titus sat in a rented UTV, flipping through sheaves of Evan’s notes and sipping from a water bottle that Evan was pretty sure contained Colt 45.

The suspension squeaked and protested as Evan dropped what felt like a hundred pounds of scrap onto the back.

“Find anything?”

“Jinx!”

 “...”

 “Oka--“

“Fuck!” Laughing, Titus finally broke the linguistic stalemate. “You first.”

“Eh, some half-decent sheet metal I can make the frame for a new Ma--gauntlet out of,” Evan said, stopping himself from saying ‘MANUS’. Titus had given him shit for “the most contrived acronym I’ve heard outside of Marvel comics” and he didn’t really feel like putting up with that right now. “A couple small motors I might be able to make work, a couple sawblades I’ve got some ideas for... you?”

Titus grimaced. “Maybe? Like... I can recognize some of this, but... the structure makes no sense to me. There’s these symbols I’ve never seen before and they’re sprinkled all over the place. If I could read magic--like, the actual spell--it’d be no problem, but...”

“Those aren’t magic,” Evan said, taking a sheet of paper from Titus’s hand. Among the arcane glyphs and half-coherent, borderline-microscopic notes were symbols that looked like a small grid of sixteen-by-sixteen squares. Dots, Xes, and other simple symbols not much bigger than a comma filled the grids. Evan laughed to himself in disbelief.

“Then what the hell is it?”

“It’s my personal reference system. Did I tell you I was on, like, a lot of drugs when I was in college? And grad school? And when I was working on my doctoral thesis? I came up with this... pattern that made sense to me, telling me where I might find connections between different pieces of information. We’re talking like, research chemical drugs, by the way. Shit that doesn’t have names yet. Hah. I can’t believe I... well, the previous me still remembered it!”

“Can the current you remember it? ”

“I think so.” Evan took more pages from Titus’s hands. “Okay, so...” He walked around to the front of the UAV and spread the pages out on its small hood. “Look, this means it’s related to this...”

A few minutes later, Evan had arranged the pages and connected various passages with pencil lines, forming an intricate grid of reference that he was enthusiastically trying to explain to a befuddled Titus.

“Man, you’re, like, a special kind of autistic, aren’t you?”

“The most special. Now don’t be an ass. Does this make any sense to you?”

“It’s... starting to, I guess,” Titus said, running his fingers along some of the connecting lines. “I think... huh. Huh.” He turned to look at Evan again, peering at him with what almost looked like suspicion.

“What?”

“You’re sure you don’t know anything about magic? Really?”

“If I did, I forgot it when I cored out my own brain. Why? What’s wrong?”

Titus exhaled loudly through his nose and pursed his lips, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he looked back at the pages.

“This isn’t just instructions. It’s... well, I think it is the spell.”

“What, like... it’s already been cast?”

“Not quite, but... it’s primed, I guess you could say?” Titus picked up the pages and looked around. “We need to spread these out. Find me something to set them on that’s not the ground.”

“So why’s that weird?” Evan asked, grunting as he rock-walked a gutted washing machine off of a nearby scrap pile.

“Well, it’s not just a matter of writing things down--No, we’re gonna need to put each of these on their own separate thing, I’m gonna need like thirty feet--to make a spell work. Just the directions themselves are a starting point. Look, grab that big cable-coil thing and turn it on its side. From this point you’d need to either gather the reagents and go through a whole ritual and cast it right then and there, or, if you’re good, you could do that whole thing and store that spell so it could be cast immediately later.”              

“And this one’s the latter?”

Titus absently tugged at his goatee. “Yeah... and that’s what’s weird about this. You didn’t have any experience in magic before, and if you only learned about it within the last year...” He inhaled deeply through his nose and stood very still for a moment, then exhaled sharply and clapped his hands. “Fuck it. Let’s see what this does!”

“Wait, you’re gonna just do it? Isn’t that dangerous?”

Titus sighed and rolled his eye. “Look, okay, let me explain why this isn’t likely to kill us or rip a hole in reality. This spell is what you’d call fundamental magic.”

“So, what, like, really beginner stuff?”

“Oh no, far from it,” Titus said, giving another chuckle that sounded like it was halfway between wonder and worry. “I mean fundamental as in ‘the fundamental laws of reality’. Magic that lets you ignore one of the big rules. Like gravity, friction, things like that. This is some serious shit you’ve got here, buddy.”

Evan went very still and very quiet. He was staring, eyes open just a little wider than normal, at the ground in the middle of the impromptu magic circle. “Which law does this one work on?” he said, barely above a whisper.

“You’ll see.”

“Dude, you can’t do that. Don’t fucking blueball me.”

“Didn’t you say that’s your ground state of being?”

“Stop fucking doing that. Stop dodging my every question with a lame one-liner.”

Titus put his hand to his chest in a gesture of mock offense, as if the very idea that his one-liners were lame was deeply wounding. “Look, alright, trust me, this is going to be worth the surprise! Just find me something that... okay, find me a machine that works. Something that you can observe working.”

Evan exhaled through his teeth. “Dude, we’re in a junkyard. The whole point of this place is it’s full of things that don’t work.”

“You got that wrist-wrecker on you?”

Evan slowly reached around to the small of his back, his hand coming back holding his revolver. “Whatever you’re going to do, it’s not going to break it or anything, is it?”

“Naaaahhh. If anything, it’s gonna make it way better. I think. C’mon, put it there in the middle!” Titus was clearly getting impatient, rocking from foot to foot like a kid on Christmas morning waiting to be told he could open his presents.

Evan brushed some dirt away before setting the gun down, an ultimately pointless gesture, but one he felt was owed; he’d never been a ‘gun guy’, but the massive revolver was one of the first things he’d encountered when he first ‘woke up’ and he’d sort of imprinted on it as a sort of security blanket. The fact that he’d fired it too few times to even require reloading--and that Titus had used it to punch a hole the size of a silver dollar through him--didn’t matter much. It wasn’t about utility; it was all sentiment. That overcompensating hunk of metal was a very real thing in a world that felt increasingly unreal.

So it was with trepidation that he stepped back outside the circle. He turned to ask Titus something, but his question caught in his throat when he saw Titus.

The smaller man’s unpatched eye had rolled back in his head and a faint pale-green light was seeping from both the socket and beneath the eyepatch. His hair fluttered and flitted upward, as if he was standing over an exhaust vent. He was muttering under his breath and his hands, held out at waist height, twitched and spasmed. As Evan watched, Titus’s fingers began making more deliberate movements, tracing out bizarre patterns that hung half-visible in the air like the after-image of a camera flash. Evan thought could hear his joints cracking as his fingers twisted themselves in ways that taxed even Titus’s freakish flexibility.

Evan stared, mouth half-open. He heard himself mutter, “...and all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, beware, beware...”

Titus’s chanting was only slightly louder than it started, but it seemed to be reverberating. Evan whirled around, swearing to himself that he heard whispering right behind his shoulder. Whatever language Titus was speaking, it wasn’t one he knew, but it felt old. As the chanting grew more intense, Evan felt like he was getting tunnel vision. He knew that it wasn’t actually getting darker, but his peripheral vision was shrinking. Was he imagining the way the air was bending? He was getting a sense of vertigo, like his perception of everything was getting infinitely taller without actually moving. That tattoo on his arm felt like it was coursing with frozen electricity.

Titus suddenly shouted a word that Evan could recognize and clapped his hands. Reality lurched. Evan stumbled forward and bent double with nausea.

“Hooo!” Titus clapped again, dancing a formless jig as Evan noisily wretched and spit stomach acid.

“Does that usually... did it work?” Evan squinted through watery eyes at the space where, just a moment ago, his gun had lain. “Hey! Where’d it go?”

“Go look closer,” Titus said, a grin threatening to split his head in half.

Evan walked carefully towards the spot at the center of the circle. The air felt somehow greasy and smelled like a thunderstorm was rolling in. There was an unpleasant buzzing on the edge of hearing, like a fly trapped between the panes of a closed window. His teeth itched.

Evan squatted down and picked up something a little over an inch long and held it between his fingers, holding it up to the light.

“No. Fucking. Way.”

It was his gun, reduced down to 1/20th scale. He gingerly reached a finger out and turned the cylinder, grinning and laughing at the tiny click. He very delicately pushed the hammer back, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a mechanical pencil, clicking it a couple of times to extend the lead.

Titus, who had been turning his own hands back and forth, staring at them quizzically, looked up. “Hey, wait! Don’t--“

Evan stuck the lead into the trigger guard and pushed the trigger back.

The sound was odd. It started out a quiet crack that seemed to experience the Doppler effect in a different direction, its pitch stretching as it roared to full volume. A very regular-sized bullet split the wood of the impromptu table.

“Holy fuck! What was that?”

“The spell only affects the gun and things inside it! The bullet left it, so it stopped affecting it!” Titus yelled, wiggling a finger in his ear. “Be careful! It still functions just the same way it did at full size!”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Evan said, distractedly. The barrel of the gun even felt hot in the palm of his hand. “So that spell ignores... conservation of mass. Jesus Christ.”

“Yep. I know you were, like, studying to be a scientist, but don’t think about it too hard. You’ll give yourself a migraine.”

“What do you mean, ‘studying to be’? The only reason you’re not referring to me as Doctor Abrams is--wait. How do I get it back to normal?”

“You remember that last word I said before I finished casting?”

Evan’s brow furrowed. “It sounded like... ‘stanza’?”

He yelped as he suddenly found himself holding a full-sized S&W 500. “Ha-HAAAA! A gen-u-ine, bona-fide fuckin’ magic weapon!” he yelled, jumping to his feet. “Stanza!” The gun was suddenly fun-sized again. “Stanza!” Gun-sized. “St--”

“Shutup! It only works a few times a day!” Titus hissed.

Evan looked up at him with an exaggerated pout. “Fiiiiine. Why do you keep looking at your hands like that?”

“Okay, so... you know how I said this spell had all the juice needed to cast it wrapped up in it? It had... more than that. A lot more.”

“So what’s that mean? Are you, like, more powerful now?”

Titus tilted his head and waggled his hand. “Not... generally. But there’s like a... separate pool designated for that spell of... well, I guess calling it ‘mana’ is the easiest explanation.”

“That makes sense, I guess. So that’s separate from your, uh, normal pool?”

“Yeah, and... it’s big, man. That was a hungry spell and I think I could do it three or four more times before having to recharge.”

“Oh, Jesus, man, if... God, think of... I’ve got so many ideas!” Evan said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. “Do you have any idea how big of a deal this is? Being able to fit a full-sized computer in an inch of space is--“

Titus held up his hand, cutting him off. “Wait.”

“Wha--” Evan started, then realized his tattoo was itching again. “What’s going--“

“Something’s coming!”

It wasn’t like a bolt of lightning. Not quite. It looked more like a several streams of fire the color of a raincloud pouring out of thin air, earthing themselves in a pile of broken appliances and scrap metal. The ping and clunk of cooling metal was all Evan and Titus could hear as they crept closer.

“What do you think it--fuck!” Evan reached out to shove Titus aside, but he’d already blinked several feet away, throwing himself to the ground. So it was only Evan who got hit by the tendril of debris that suddenly snaked out of the junk pile. It was nearly as wide as his torso and hit like a truck, scooping him off his feet and pinning him to the ground with force that broke at least a couple of his ribs.

Titus had gotten to one knee and was firing at the tendril with one of the pistols he always seemed to pull out of nowhere, but all that seemed to accomplish besides a couple of ricochets was to provoke the mass to extend another arm and swipe down at him from above. He blinked out again but lost his footing as he leapt, crashing to the ground and losing his grip on the gun.

“Disjunct it!”

“I’m trying! It’s got like a... shell or something! I can’t get through!”

Desperately trying to keep the thing from crushing him further, Evan raised his own gun and fired point-blank into the mass of the tendril. Aside from nearly breaking his wrist from the recoil, there seemed to be no effect; the bullets either bounced punched through sheet metal or simply slid between the gaps in the junk that floated in the strange light as though bobbing just below the surface of water.

“Don’t know what I expected,” Evan grumbled, tossing his gun away. Time for another approach, then.

It was hard to concentrate while the thing was steadily pushing him deeper into the mud, but Evan summoned up his will and concentrated on the idea of his Cables wrapping around his left forearm. He wound them tight, compressed them, and then swung his fist upward and let the tension unwind.

The impact drove enough of the junk into the air to allow him to scramble to his feet, but it didn’t even leave the cohesion of the gray light. It hung in the air for a moment, then rebounded as if on elastic, slamming back into a tree-trunk-sized tendril once again.

“Well, that seemed to do something,” Titus said as they both jumped backward, trying to get out of the thing’s thrashing reach. “Maybe a few more of those’ll soften it up and...”

“Probably not a real tenable strategy,” Evan hissed through clenched teeth. Titus saw that the punch had probably done more damage to Evan than the monster--his forearm hung at an angle that made it look as though he’d grown a second elbow between the first and his wrist, and none of his fingers were pointing close to the right direction. Over the strange din of the animate debris scraping together, the crickle-crack of tendons snapping bone back into place was audible.

“No chance you figured out how to that big pain-punch again?”

“None! And I don’t think just hitting it is gonna work! We’re just gonna be breaking what it’s made of! Do you have anything that can actually damage magic?”

“Nothing that works anywhere near as quick as we need!”

They both dove behind another heap of scrap. “I think I might have an idea, but I honestly don’t know what this’ll do, or if it’ll even work at all,” Evan said. “I don’t want to have to run away from this thing and leave it here, but if this doesn’t work...”

“Yeah, I got it. What’s your plan?”

Evan clenched his right fist, his misshapen jaw popping as he gritted his teeth together with effort. “Instead of a coiled spring that just makes my punch stronger,” he hissed through his teeth, “what about if I hit it with the Cables instead?”

Titus squinted at Evan’s fist, then blanched. “Oh no, dude, don’t do that. If that’s really your soul you’re working with--”

Evan suddenly sprung to his feet and sprinted around the heap, screaming wordless defiance. Titus swore and slipped out of time briefly so he could stand up and pull another handgun from his jacket in time to provide Evan with covering fire, for whatever that was worth.

Evan juked another swing from a tendril, then planted his foot on it and used it a springboard to launch himself into the air. His right arm swung overhead in a long, sweeping arc, and he brought his hand down like a hammer on top of the scrap pile and let the Cables wrapped in a ball around his fist unwind.

The scrap pile buckled like an anthill sprayed with a hose. Though no sound aside from pulverizing scrap could be heard by the human ear, a psychic wail of pain and rage seemed to scrape across both men’s minds as the gray light rippled and dimmed at the point of Evan’s hammerblow. Barely keeping his footing on the shifting rubble, Evan drove his left hand down into the mass, forcing what remaining will he could muster into the idea of his arm.

He met surprisingly little resistance. Unlike when he’d shut off Titus’s powers, there was next to nothing to sense here. It seemed to be barely a being at all. When his ethereal arm touched something cold and writhing amongst the half-sensed notions of metal and creeping lightning, he closed his thought-fingers around it and yanked.

The was no more fanfare. The light completely vanished, and with it, the remainder of the force holding the pile of junk together. Evan felt a familiar sensation of something sliding from his grip into the core of his being before he toppled backwards and was buried in the shifting scrap.

“Come on, I know that couldn’t’ve hurt you that much,” Titus said, tossing aside a rust-eaten sink and uncovering Evan’s face. Evan hadn’t seemed to be able to free himself from the rubble, and Titus was forced to follow the sound of muffled sobbing to figure out where to dig. Evan crying was such a strange sound that it made the hair on the back on Titus’s neck stand up; it started with a drawn-out, warbling moan, leading to wheezing sobs that were accompanied by high-pitched hitching gasps and a strange whistling noise that Titus put down to the bridge of Evan’s nose resembling a stretched-out letter Z. “Did that shut off your healing or something? Come on, get up.”

Evan didn’t move for a moment, then sniffed loudly and listlessly reached up and took Titus’s hand. “What’s the point?” he muttered, letting himself be pulled upwards.

“Huh?”

“What’s the point of this? What am I even doing this for?” Evan said morosely, sluggishly following Titus across the pile of debris. “What difference can I actually make?!”

Titus turned as he walked, eyeing Evan with something that might have been concern. “What’re you talking about? You beat that thing! Hell, Moreno gave you more trouble! Why would you have a crisis of confidence over this?”

“It’s not about that,” Evan spat, sulkily, “I mean this whole hero thing! Did I seriously think I could save the fucking world? Jesus Christ, I’m a murderer!”

“How man times am I gonna—”

“Stop telling me he deserved it! That doesn’t matter! What about all the people who’ll wonder what happened to him, the people who’ll miss him? What about his parents?”

“They’re both dead,” Titus said, flatly.

“Oh, sure, that’s real convenient, you—”

“I can show you both of their obituaries. They were both dead before w—he was out of high school.”

Evan sniffed. “Do you… do you think that’s why he—”

“Look, man, I’m not a psychiatrist! But speaking of, what’s wrong with you? I know you’ve got a big heart and all, but why now?”

“I-I-I don’t know!” Evan stammered, choking back a sob. “Everything just feels so… so… hopeless and pointless and… sad!”

Titus’s frown deepened. “What, did you get rapid-onset depression somehow?”

“Is this what that feels like? How do people live like this?”

Titus muttered something Evan couldn’t hear and walked up to him, grabbing his left wrist. “Circle,” he commanded, lifting Evan’s hand to his face. Evan obediently touched the tip of his thumb and forefinger together and Titus peered through the hole, scanning Evan up and down.

“Oh.”

“What? What?!”

“Okay, don’t freak out about this, but—”

“You’ve just made sure I do! What is it?”

“Look at your right hand.”

Evan raised his fingers to his eye, then looked down at his right hand. He began to shake.

The Cables near his right hand had unraveled, spreading out into the surrounding air like drifting cornsilk, barely anchored to the rest of the mass.

“Ohhhhh fuck oh fuck oh fuck ooooohhhhh God what is that what did I—”

“Evan!” Titus grabbed the side of Evan’s head and forced him to look at him. “Look at me! Listen! I don’t know but it’s probably not permanent! This sort of thing can heal like your body does! You’ll probably be fine!”

“Probably?!” Evan shrieked, his voice surprisingly high and shrill. “I think I broke my soul!”

“You didn’t break anything! Look at me!” Titus yelled. “You might have injured it, but it will probably heal!”

“You don’t know that!” Evan wailed.

“And you don’t know it won’t! Listen! Astral bodies, or however you wanna categorize all this shit, are living things! They have analogies to physical processes! You may have just, I don’t know, sprained something! Nothing’s gone, it just needs to come back together!”

“Are you saying depressed people have, what, bruised souls? That seems kind of insulting!”

“Don’t get fucking combative with me!” Titus snapped. “That is not what I’m saying! I’m saying that you did something reckless and banged up what we’re assuming is the physical manifestation of your immortal soul, and you’re experiencing what I’d describe as common symptoms of depression, and it’s not hard to put two and two together! You gave yourself actual psychic damage, if that’s how you want to think about it!”

“So you’re saying it’s all my fault…”

“God dammit, man!” Titus threw his hands up in the air. “Look, think about this logically. You’re obvious not yourself right now, right?”

Evan sighed. “I dunno… maybe this is—”

“Aha!” Titus thrust a finger at Evan. “See? I know we haven’t known each other long, but in that whole time, you’ve never doubted yourself! Wondered if you made the wrong decision or were doing the right thing, sure, but never were unsure of who you are, right?”

Evan blinked bleary eyes at him. “I… I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, come on,” Titus wrapped an arm around Evan’s shoulder and guided him back to the UTV. “Let’s get you back home and to bed. I bet you’ll feel better after a nap.”

“I need a drink.”

“No alcohol! Straight to bed with you, mister!”

---------------------------------------------------------

“Ugh. God, that was awful. And embarrassing,” Evan muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Thanks for looking out for me, Titus.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Titus said from the driver’s seat. “Had me freaking out there for a bit, I gotta admit. I really had no idea if what I was saying was right or not. You feeling better?”

“Not all the way, but I think I’ll get there. Enough to realize that what I was saying and feeling wasn’t really me. Now I just feel mentally exhausted. Probably gonna go back to bed soon.”

“How’s your, uh, soul lookin’?”

Evan peered through his fingers at his hand. “Coming back together. Not wound tight yet, but it looks like you were right. It’s getting there.” He patted Titus on the shoulder. “Seriously, man. Thank you. I was in a real bad place there for a bit. I don’t know what I’d’ve done it you weren’t there.”

“Aw, don’t get all sappy on me, you big fugly lug,” Titus tried to sound grumpy, but couldn’t help but manage a smile. “Why don’t you go lay back down? We’ll be crossing the state line in a couple hours. After that I’ll find a rest stop to park for a few hours.”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Evan yawned. “Thanks again. Man, I am so glad that was temporary…”

“Runnin’ out of places to run, Moreno!”

The stairwell echoed with the sound of five pairs of pounding feet. Dust and flakes of rust showered down as the long-unused metal groaned under the impact. Titus took the stairs two at a time, surprising Evan with his speed as he waved his gun and shouted furious threats. In their short time together, Titus hadn’t given Evan the impression that he was a man to completely lose his cool, but as soon as they’d spotted Moreno and his posse Titus had taken off like a shot. Evan was actually having trouble keeping up with him.

“You’re a dead man, Moreno! I’ll rip your eyes out! I’m gonna feed you your fucking fingernails!”

Something was bothering Evan. Moreno’s crew had a one-man numbers advantage and, while none of them were as big as Evan, they all looked like pretty dangerous characters. Were they aware of what Titus could do and were afraid of him? Moreno didn’t look armed, but Evan was sure he’d seen large handguns sticking out of the waistbands of his flunkies (who Evan was mentally referring to as Do-rag and Dreads).

This was almost certainly a trap.

Moreno’s crew burst down a door and out of the stairwell into a maze of HVAC ducts under the twilight sky. Titus sprinted after them, ducking and weaving around the bulky metal as Evan tried to follow, though he found himself quickly losing speed; he had to turn himself sideways to squeeze through the tight fits that his leaner companion slipped through easily. After an embarrassing moment of getting stuck due to his bulbous chest, Evan gave up and simply jumped upward, catching the edge of a huge cooling unit with his fingertips and hauling himself up.

Now this was more like it; gleeful memories of his college weekends spent freerunning came rushing back. Evan sprang across the protesting metal with ease, quickly catching up to Moreno’s posse. The three had broken free of the rooftop labyrinth and were heading across an open stretch of roof towards what looked like another access stairway. Evan leapt from the top of the ducting and sprinted across the roof, curving around to cut off their escape. At the same time, Titus emerged behind them.

It all happened very quickly. Do-rag and Dreads went to pull their guns, but Titus was suddenly several feet closer to them, yanking their weapon away from them via thin cords held in his fist. Evan grinned. Those had been his idea; lightweight metal clips at the end of high-tension wire that Titus could attach to things while time was stopped, letting him disarm a threat the instant he jumped back into regular time. Maybe I really am good at this superhero thing, Evan thought, raising his fists.

Moreno gave Evan a withering look, then turned calmly to face Titus. “Well, Mr. Finnegan. To what do I owe this pleasure?” His voice was strangely coarse, at stark contrast with his smooth appearance. Evan thought he could see a jagged scar on his neck.

“Don’t be fucking coy, you degenerate,” Titus snarled, still red-faced from exertion. He cocked the slide of one of the pilfered pistols and raised it. “You tell me where the Soultaker is and maybe I just shoot you.”

“And if I were to refuse such a generous offer?”

“My buddy back there breaks every bone in your body and we take bets on which of your organs fails first,” Titus retorted. “You don’t get out of this alive, Moreno, one way or the other. You’ve had this coming for a long fucking time. I’ll find another lead if I have to. As far as I’m concerned, the end goal here is to make sure you never see another sunrise.”

Moreno cast a glance back over his shoulder at Evan, then nodded at his accomplices. Both men took a step away from him.

Moreno made no visible movement beyond clenching his fists and giving a sort of full-body shrug, but there was an intangible sense of pure effort and the air around him seemed to catch fire with a sharp percussive sound. A sort of white light radiated from his body, a sort of wavering distortion that outlined his figure and superimposed itself nearly a foot onto the air around him. A faint sound like a cross between distant roaring waves and rushing wind accompanied the glow.

The color drained from Titus’s face. “Oh, fuck me,” he muttered, “he’s an aura fighter.”

“A what?” Evan called. This no longer seemed like it was going to be a simple beating.

“Uh… nothing you can’t handle!” Titus called, backtracking the way he’d come. “You got this! Keep him alive if you can! Good luck!” He blinked out of sight, and a second later Evan heard hurried footsteps disappearing back into the maze of ductwork.

“You son of a bitch! Get back here!” Evan shouted after the fading footfalls. “I thought we were supposed to be--ow! Fuck off!”

Do-rag and Dreads had rushed him and were grabbing at his clothes and punching him. It was hardly elegant, but both men were quite strong and their blows had an accuracy and intensity that could only come from someone who’d done this before. While neither of them could probably deliver a killing blow on Evan, if they kept hammering on his ribs there was a chance of them breaking and subsequently puncturing something, which would put him in a much more vulnerable position while he healed. That wouldn’t do.

Already bent nearly double under the rain of blows, Evan lunged forward, driving his shoulder into Dreads’s stomach. As the lanky man bent double as well, Evan thew his arms around his waist, squeezed tight, and lifted. Twisting around, he swung Dreads downward like a sledgehammer and hit Do-rag on the shoulder. It wasn’t the most effective or efficient move, but Evan hoped it would take some of the wind out of their sails to be used as weapons against each other. As it was, Dreads was on the ground and Do-rag was knocked off-balance. Evan raised his fist in a boxer’s stance and darted forward, his left fist snapping out like a whip and catching Do-rag on the jaw just as shifted his weight forward to regain his balance. Do-rag’s eyes unfocused and he limply continued his downward trajectory, landing heavily on his co-miscreant. Evan reached down with the intent to grab Dreads’s leg and smash his kneecap or stomp on his ankle to take him out of the fight for good.

And then Moreno walked up and hit him from behind.

It wasn’t a skillful strike. It wasn’t even a punch. Moreno almost lazily swung his right arm across his body from the hip and sent Evan flying with an impossible amount of force. The Ugly Man flew ten feet through the air and bounced when he hit the roof, rolling several feet before coming to a stop.

Evan gasped in pain. That hurt. It hurt in a way that he’d never experienced, and apparently whatever he’d stolen from the pain demon couldn’t figure out how much of a threat it was—which meant his body reacted to it with all the usual inconveniences that came with grievous injury. Evan rolled over onto his knees and forearms to get off his aching back. In addition to the damage that came with being hit with the force of a speeding truck in the form of a slap, when Moreno’s aura had made contact it felt like if a friction burn could be made out of the sensation of blood flowing back into an asleep foot. It penetrated deep into his tissues, like the kind of sub-zero cold that sticks to you even after you’ve gotten inside. It was unnatural and frightening, but despite himself, Evan felt his curiosity and sense of wonder perk up. He wanted to know more about this.

He’d settle for figuring out how to keep it from killing him in the meantime. He pushed himself up, squared his shoulders, and charged towards Moreno. It was hardly graceful, but Moreno didn’t move to defend himself, so Evan threw a heavy, lunging punch right at his head. His fist hit Moreno’s aura and... stopped.

It wasn’t like hitting a wall or anything solid. The punch just lost all momentum an inch from Moreno’s nose and hung in the air, tingling slightly in the aura. He couldn’t push his first forward, but it didn’t feel like he was being pressed against--he just couldn’t move his arm towards Moreno. Moreno smirked at him.

“Having problems?” He drawled lazily as Evan pulled back and swung again, only to have the blow halt in the air again.

“Not as many as you’re about to,” Evan muttered, pulling up his right sleeve. “SHAZAM!”

The lightning gun bucked and the bolt hit Moreno square in the chest, splashing out across the surface of his aura. Moreno seized up, gritting his teeth and grunting with the apparent effort of keeping the electricity from coming into contact with his actual physical body. Evan’s jaw fell open as Moreno’s grunt turned into a strained yell, and he barely managed to jump to the side as Moreno thrust his arm out and somehow projected the electricity off of his aura and through the air. Evan gaped at Moreno, then turned to see a three-foot-wide section of the waist-high parapet wall reduced to a ragged, glowing hole.

“Are you kiddi--“

Evan managed to get his right arm up in time to block the punch, but he probably shouldn’t have bothered. The impact of the aura-boosted blow crushed the metal of the MANUS around his forearm and at least fractured the bone beneath. The impossible force lifted him off his feet and sent him rolling across the roof at a nauseating pace, and he barely managed to grab the lip of the broken wall before he could plummet to the alley floor four stories below.

For a brief moment, Evan hung limply by his left arm, head spinning and body ringing with the alien pain of the aura’s impact. Then a voice called from below, bringing him partially back to his senses.

“Having trouble up there?”

“Titus?” Evan groaned, attempting to twist himself around to get his feet against the wall. “What did you get me into, you dickhead?”

“Yeah, sorry about that! I really had no idea! You think you can take him?”

“I don’t know what I’m dealing with! What the hell’s up with this aura thing?” Evan gritted his teeth as he felt his right arm start to mend. His healing was already slowing down.

“The say it’s kinda like... an expression of his ‘fighting spirit’ or some bullshit like that! Like a manifestation of effort beyond what the body can contain!”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

“No shit!”

“Stop fucking around!” Evan snarled, finally managing to get his feet planted against the brick. “What can I do about it?”

“No idea! But I know it ain’t free! He’s gotta concentrate to keep it going, so he can’t keep it up forever! Oh shit, watch out!”

Evan looked up to see Dreads standing over him, raising a chunk of the ruined wall over his head.

“Guerilla Radio!”

Evan gritted his teeth against the ear-piercing screech from his functioning gauntlet, but he had known it was coming. Dreads hadn’t, and reflexively clapped his hands of his ears--hands that had, a split second ago, been holding a ten-pound chunk of concrete over his head. His expression went slack as the chunk bounced off his temple and toppled sideways out of sight. Evan swung himself to the side to avoid it, and felt a bit of smug satisfaction at the yelp of “watch it!” that echoed from below.

His right forearm had patched itself together well enough that he could move his fingers again, so Evan grabbed the lip of the roof with both hands and pulled himself up. Moreno was still standing where he had after sending Evan flying, and Evan felt his face split into a grin when he realized that Moreno’s aura had vanished. In fact, he looked exhausted. He was soaked with sweat and bent nearly double, holding himself up with one arm against a nearby duct. He grimaced and swore when he saw Evan, then made that effort again and his aura popped back into view. Evan noticed it didn’t look nearly as solid this time, and it didn’t extend nearly as far from his body. He really can’t keep it up! I can wear him down! I’ve just to stay a threat but keep out of his range...

Still bent over and with obvious effort, Moreno raised an arm towards Evan, fingers spread and palm forward, and launched a fist-sized mass of his aura towards Evan. It felt like getting smacked in the chest with a minor-league fastball, if the ball was made out of molten glass and filled with static electricity. Evan rocked back on his heels and nearly fell backwards. Moreno let out a strained laugh and launched another ball. Evan tried to jump out of the way, but he was still off-balance and the shot caught him in the thigh. His leg buckled under him and he fell painfully forward onto one knee.

Moreno kept launching more aura-blasts at Evan, who put up his arms in what proved to be a futile attempt to block the shots. It felt like the blasts were getting smaller the more Moreno fired, but they were still hurting Evan on a level that felt like it went beyond physical. He knew he couldn’t keep taking the shots; Moreno might not be able to deliver a killing blow with the blasts, but the damage he was doing was eating up what was left of the calories fueling Evan’s healing. The prospect of Evan winning a war of attrition was rapidly evaporating; he knew if he didn’t do something, he’d eventually be too tired to move and then they would just cut his throat or throw him off the roof again or something else uninspired-but-lethal. His mind started to race.

Titus said it’s something like a manifestation of willpower. Don’t assume it obeys the normal laws of physics. The damage is does feels like it’s more than physical, like it’s hurting my very... essence...

That’s it! Maybe that’s it!

Evan took a deep, deliberate breath and tried to focus.

Visualize. It’s all about metaphor and allegory and analogy. Think of what you could do to shield yourself.

In his mind’s eye, he saw the cobalt cables that may or may not have been there; he watched them move with the jerky, manic speed of a time-lapse video of roots spreading. And then he saw them coil tightly around his upraised forearms.

I felt that!

A light pressure was added to the contact of the MANUS around his forearms. It didn’t seem to have a texture or temperature, but it was almost certainly there. Evan thought he could sense a faint vibration, or maybe a hint of static electricity.

He almost didn’t see Moreno’s next blast coming, and threw his arms up back up with a yelp. The shot hit... and bounced off, smacking into the roof and creating a small wisp of smoke. Evan felt the impact resonate through him on a level he couldn’t properly parse--it was as if his actual being was shaking from the impact. The effort of the visualization seemed to skyrocket, and he struggled to keep the coiled cables in mind.

But it had worked.

Moreno gaped at him for a moment, and Evan felt himself start to grin.

It had worked! He’d taken a chance and thought it out and tried something and it had worked!

A reckless confidence surged through Evan. With a mighty mental push, he redoubled his focus on the image. The cables wound tighter, glowed brighter, hummed louder. And he now had no doubt that he could feel them touching his skin, bracing his body with pure essence of effort. He lurched to his feet and charged at Moreno.

And Moreno, for the first time, looked afraid. He started to backpedal, his aura flickering as he struggled to maintain it and move at the same time. He still managed to fire off a few more shots, but they were faltering, half-formed things that Evan swatted out of the air with ease. When Evan got within ten feet, Moreno seemed to collect himself and stopped trying to retreat, flaring his aura up again with an effort that made veins stand out on his sweat-beaded forehead.

Evan drew back his arm, and, in doing so, felt the coiled cables around his arm contract. When he threw the punch, it was faster and harder than any he’d ever thrown--as if his fist were propelled by a giant spring. The force of it nearly dislocated his shoulder.

It also was enough to get through Moreno’s aura. Much of the momentum was leeched away, but there was still enough left to break Moreno’s nose and send blood spraying with a resounding crunch. Moreno let out a surprisingly high-pitched cry of pain and surprise and reeled backwards. Evan laughed triumphantly, and then immediately slumped to the ground.

There was no fight left in him. He couldn’t bring himself to bring himself to even try to move. It was like a combination of couch lock and the worst hangover he’d ever experienced, if you could be stoned and have a hangover in your soul. He didn’t even try to move when Moreno walked up to his prone form and stomped on him so hard he sank into the roof.

Why am I even doing this...

Moreno stomped on him again. Evan was pretty sure he felt his pelvis fracture, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. In fact, his thoughts began to drift...

He was 19. It was the finals of the Midwestern Amateur Boxing Tournament. And his opponent was Donny Barlow.

Evan had to admit that Donny was pretty good, but he knew he could take him. So why was he getting beaten so badly?

Because Donny was using plated gloves. Normally Evan would have thought that wasn’t possible--they were both searched before the match--but then again, the refree seemed to be counting awfully slow whenever Donny was knocked down.

So he was fighting a fixed fight. What could he do? How could he win this? What was the point?

“Hold him up,” Moreno said. Evan dimly felt his arms being grabbed and being pulled up to his knees.

He felt like giving up. Unless he could put Donny down decisively, there was no way he was going to win this.

“Gonna knock your fuckin’ block off,” Moreno muttered, wiping blood from his nose. The air around him crackled as his aura flared and he drew his fist back.

Just as Evan was about to lean on the ropes and signal he was done, he heard his mother’s voice from the crowd. His mother, usually so reserved. Usually so disdainful of the violence of boxing.

“Come on, Evan! Knock his ass out!”

“’m gonna knock you out,” Evan mumbled.

Morena paused. “What did you say, asshole?”

He lunged forward, catching Donny with an uppercut so fierce that it dislocated one of his fingers. He could hear Donny’s jaw break as he slumped to the floor.

“Momma

said

KNOCK

YOU

OUUUUTTTTT!”

The pain vanished as quickly as water drops out of a ruptured water balloon. Evan couldn’t explain how, but he as the pain drained away, he felt it change into something else.

Strength. Raw, undiluted, primal strength. Strength so pure, so undeniable, so powerful, that the muscles of his right arm began to bulge inhumanly to accommodate and express it. He could feel his bones swelling impossibly to support the new muscle. He felt like his skin was about to rupture as the pressure built inside his arm. He wanted to let it out. He needed to let it out. It was irresistible. It was exhilarating. It was the closest thing to ejaculation he’d felt in years.

The force of Evan’s arm tripling in size burst the MANUS off his wrist and knocked Dreads off of him. Moreno had hesitated mid-swing, his mouth dropping open in an exclamation of surprise and confusion. And Evan, with force that he knew was beyond even what his engorged muscles were capable of, punched him square in the solar plexus.

It was a sloppy punch that was somewhere between a cross and an uppercut. His boxing coach would have berated him for it.

But it got the job done.

Moreno’s aura offered up about as much resistance as a soap bubble and popped out of existence with a sound like a light bulb blowing out. He bent nearly double around Evan’s fist, then was launched backwards on a flat horizontal trajectory at eye-watering speed. The duct he collided with buckled with a hideous screech, but it couldn’t stop Moreno’s momentum. The aluminum sheared as he continued to press into it; unfortunately, that resulted in a lot of sharp, jagged edges that caught Moreno as he passed through. Most of Moreno’s clothes stayed with the duct, but that was hardly the worst of it; a mangled mass of meat and bone falling to the roof was all that remained of his left arm from the elbow down.

The next duct didn’t give up the ghost so easily, but the struts supporting it weren’t as tough. The resulting bending of the duct caused Moreno to roll horizontally along the side of it, spinning off the end and smashing his head against a cooling unit with a sound of a gong. This impact reversed what remained of his momentum, causing him to spin face-down on the roof a couple of times before finally coming to a rest.

Steam was coming off of Evan’s arm as it began to shrink back down to normal. With an indignant glare, he yanked his left arm out of Do-rag’s limp grasp. He wasn’t in pain any more, but he didn’t feel good. Though he wasn’t hurting, he wasn’t numb, either, and the profound wrongness of what had happened to his body was making itself known. Whatever that strength surge had done was wearing off fast, and the exhaustion/malaise combo was quickly reasserting itself. He did his best to look threatening as he stalked across the roof toward Moreno’s body.

Which moved.

Making sounds which no human should make--and not all of them with his mouth--Moreno was pushing himself up with his remaining hand. His aura was trying to reform, but it was snapping on and off with a sound like a downed power line. He managed to get to his knees, and Evan could see the gruesome fruits of his labor.

Evan’s first thought was that Moreno was bleeding remarkably little, but he quickly realized that that was because a good quantity of his blood was already in a puddle around Evan’s shoes. His left eye was hanging out of its socket, red and wrinkled and deflated like a rotten tomato. Gore-coated ribs were clearly visible through the shredded tissue of his back, and his once-beautiful hair hung halfway off his head. The last impact had all but scalped him.

“Grrgkgl.” Moreno grabbed the nearby wall with his remaining hand--a hand which only had three fingers that were still the right shape--and tried to pull himself up on shaky, friction-shredded legs. He managed to sling his arm over it and slumped against it. In doing so, he turned towards Evan, and Evan’s heart hitched in his chest as it became evident that he had killed this man.

“For God’s sake, man, stay down!” Evan shouted, desperately. “You’re going to make things worse if you keep moving around!” Evan knew that there was basically no way Moreno was going to get better—Evan could see the shattered remains of the left side of his ribcage through his shredded flesh, and his intestines were threatening to spill through the remains of the muscles that once held them. He’d seen people hit by trains that had a better chance of survival. But he still had to try.

“Look, I’m a doctor, maybe I can help you!” A lie on a couple of fronts, but he didn’t feel like going into the semantics of his medical skills right now. The second lie was really more to himself than anyone else.

Moreno made another guttural noise, this one more urgent, as Evan walked towards him, hand outstretched. What remained of his face was contorted in panic. When Evan got just outside of arm’s reach, Moreno screeched and tried to lunge away from him. The only way to go was back, and he was already halfway leaning over the wall.

“No!”

Evan dove at Moreno as he overbalanced and toppled over the wall. They were only four stories up. Moreno’s hand was inches from his, desperately grasping at thin air as he fell. With everything he had left, Evan willed himself to reach the outstretched fingers—and felt the invisible force of the cables reach out and pull him towards Moreno with enough time grab him and roll under him in midair. Evan just barely got beneath Moreno before they both hit the ground and the world switched off.

“Food,” Evan heard himself gasp through a haze of pain and what felt like moderate brain damage. He faintly recognized the sound of footsteps approaching him, then felt something pressed against his lips. Swallowing even the protein slurry that was squirted into his mouth was difficult, but he managed to get some of it down and could feel his healing speed up within moments after swallowing. As his vision began to return, he saw Titus standing over him with an expression that was more of curiosity than concern.

“Well, I’ll be damned. That actually worked.”

Evan coughed and tried to sit up. He couldn’t feel anything below his waist, but he managed to get one arm beneath himself and pushed himself up slightly. His head lolled limply on his shoulders, making his perspective lopsided and nauseating. “That was the worst one so far. The process that makes me breathe wasn’t starting up so I suffocated a couple times.” He winced as a series of popping sounds signaled his neck had begun to heal, slowly pulling his head upright.

“I’m surprised you don’t know the fancy name for that process, Mr. Smart Guy,” Titus said, hooking his hands under Evan’s armpits and twisting his torso around so he was somewhat sitting up.

“I have, like, multiple concussions right now. Lay off,” Evan groaned. “Where’s Moren... oh.”

Caesar Moreno sat slumped, unmoving, against the wall of the alley. His remaining eye was unfocused and already beginning to cloud over.

“Dammit. I really didn’t mean to kill him. I...” Evan pounded his fist on the pavement in frustration.

Titus sighed heavily, looking into the middle distance. “Look, I know you’re trying to do the whole ‘no killing’ thing, but he was trying to kill you. Us. Plus, if anyone deserved to die, it was him.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a battered carton of cigarettes, retrieved one, and stuck it between his lips. Evan hadn’t realized he smoked.

“This bastard left a trail of bodies and broken lives across this country for the better part of two years,” Titus said flatly, fishing a battered lighter from his pocket, “not too long ago I found the body of a girl, no older than twenty, in the bathtub of a motel room he and his cronies had rented. They’d wrapped her in duct tape, put her face-down in there, and spent the next day drinking cheap beer and pissing in the tub until there was enough urine to drown her.”

He paused to light the cigarette, took a long drag, and blew it out through his nose.

“She probably wasn’t dead six hours by the time I found her. I was this close... but you did the world a favor today. Don’t you lose sleep over this waste of skin.”

Evan fought down the urge to vomit. “But... we didn’t get the Soultaker’s location out of him. We’re back to square one!”

“Nah, don’t worry about that,” Titus waved a hand dismissively, not looking at Evan. He seemed to be both trying to and not to look at Moreno’s body. “I caught up with his goons. Had a nice chat with them. Couldn’t get the big guy’s location, but apparently these losers were on their way to Detroit to negotiate a deal with a buyer. We got what we came for.”

“Well... okay, good, that’s something, at least,” Evan grunted, gritting his teeth as his spine finally healed enough for him to feel his broken legs patching themselves up. “Did you get to Moreno before he...?”

“I guess this... is the part where... you get to say ‘I told you... so’.”

“I’m not the one who said you were gonna die in an alley somewhere,” Titus said, sitting down next to Moreno. “At least, not originally. That was Mr. Krolicki, I think.”

Moreno chuckled weakly. “Yeah... after that thing with the M-80s and his... huuhhhhh... mailbox. What was that? Summer of ’95?”

“96, I think.”

“Shit. Feels like that was just a couple... years ago. Can’t believe it was more than... twenty. Fucked up.”

“How are you still alive? I think I can actually see into your skull.”

”Usin’ the Glow to... huhhhh... keep my heart beating and lungs... from collapsing.”

Titus thought he could see the white light of Moreno’s aura, weak and flicking, shining out of his ruined chest.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Neither did I. Won’t last long. Taking everything I got. Wanted to talk to you.”

“About what? You expect me to be your deathbed confessor, after everything you’ve done?”

“Nah, nah, nothin’ like that. You got a smoke?”

“Doesn’t sound like something you should be doing in your state.”

Moreno’s remaining eye rolled towards him. “Does it look like I’m gonna get better?”

“Fair, fair.” Titus placed a cigarette between Moreno’s lips and lit it. The end flared as the dying man sucked greedily. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Nothing. Just... to talk. Don’t friends do that?”

“Man, it’s been a long-ass time since we were friends.”

“Is it really? Wasn’t this all... just business?”

Titus’s jaw clenched for a moment as he felt his chest tighten. “Well... you picked a really shitty line of work. Someone had to do something about it. Might as well be me.”

Moreno chuckled. “You’ve come a long... huhhhh... way from the scrawny little kid who used to... shimmy up drainpipes at the first sign of trouble. Though you still... huhhh... let other people do the heavy lifting, huh?” He gestured as best he could with his head towards Evan’s broken body.

“Kid’s got a good heart, and as far as I can tell is indestructible. Better him take the hits than me.”

“I think I can hear his bones... cracking. What... is he? Never seen anyone do what he did.”

“I don’t know,” Titus said. ”I think he’s something new.”

“Well how about that. Ain’t that... huuuuhhhhhhh....” Moreno’s wheeze turned sharper, more desperate. Titus sat up straighter.

“Don’t you die on me yet, you bastard! Where’s your boss? Where’s the Soultaker?”

Moreno coughed, barely managing to keep the cigarette between his lips. “Give me a... little...credit. Let me at least... die... with some professional dignity.”

“Motherfucker, I will make your last moments a lot worse if--“

“Grab one of my boys, they’ll be able to tell you something,” Moreno whispered. Titus sat back, glaring straight ahead. “They’re chickenshit like that.”

Titus said nothing.

“This is the part where I should... feel bad, right? But... if I felt bad now... wouldn’t that make it... worse? If I had it in me... to regret what I’ve done... but still kept doing it... the whole time... isn’t that... worse... than...”

”...Moreno?”

The light from Moreno’s chest faded. A few wisps of cigarette smoke rose from the punctured lungs. The cigarette wobbled for a moment, then dropped onto the pavement.

”...Caesar?”

“If you must know,” Evan sighed, spearing a glistening sausage on the end of a flimsy plastic fork, “my jackass older sister thought it would be hilarious to give me a cupcake she'd baked with about a dozen powdered viagra for my fifteenth birthday. I wound up passing out eventually. Burst a lot of blood vessels. Damaged the erectile tissue beyond usefulness.”

Titus froze mid-coffee-sip. “Seriously? What a bitch!”

“Buddy, you don't know the half of it.”

“So... no signs of life down there?”

“Nothing for twelve years.”

“I think I would literally kill myself.”

“It's not so bad, I guess. At least I don't have to drain the blood out of it any more.”

“Eugh! Fuck! Did not need to hear that!”

“Well, maybe you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer to.”

“Do you get, like, blue balls all the time, then?”

“That's basically my ground state of being.”

Titus whistled flatly, avoiding looking Evan in the eye. He settled for staring at the table. There wasn't a lot of Evan's face that he felt comfortable looking at; every part seemed to at least be adjacent to some unpleasantry or another. About the only safe area was his right eye, which, as luck would have it, was directly opposite Titus's 'good' eye. Titus rallied and met Evan's gaze again. “Alright, your turn.”

They'd agreed on a sort of mutual interview process, taking turns asking questions to suss out what the other was capable or if he was worth having around. Evan took a bite out of the sausage and chewed thoughtfully for a moment.

“Who's Moreno?”

Titus hissed through his teeth. “A real piece of shit.”

“I'm going to need more than that.”

“I'm getting to it. He's basically, like... a freelance henchman? Like, sort of a mercenary criminal. Sells his services to the highest bidder.”

“And why's he matter?”

“That's another question.”

“No, it is not,” Evan said, quiet and serious. “Do not argue with me in bad faith, Titus. I have very little patience for it in the best of times.”

Titus regarded him for a long moment. The man across from him was wider than the table they sat at. His muscles were so pronounced in some points that Titus could tell when he was about to move by the way they bulged and contracted. Yet he gave the impression that he was constantly trying to pull himself inward, to make himself smaller. He spoke quietly and with a simple formality, but only hours before Titus had watched him single-handedly beat down some of the nastiest people he'd met in the past month.

Hmm.

“Fine. Moreno matters because I'm after the guy he's working for. You see, Moreno isn't just a normal scumbag. He works for people who need nasty things done. Not like regular nasty, either. How much do you actually know about magic?”

“I've got some... notes. So far I'm not able to find a lot of coherent rules. It mostly seems like it relies on things that nobody would normally do.”

Titus snapped his fingers and pointed at Evan. “Hit it right on the head. Rituals, reagents, that kind of thing... the reason—well, one of the reasons—magic doesn't just happen all the time by accident is that it's all weird little things. A lot of the more heavy magic relies on some pretty elaborate and obtuse shit to get it going.”

Evan momentarily thought back to the Book of Fate and his ritual in the woods. “So Moreno does these things for people?”

“Yeah. Thing is, though...” Titus stopped raising a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth and set it down again, as if he'd momentarily lost his appetite. “The people who use his services generally practice some pretty vile magic. Real depraved shit. And to empower depraved magic, you need depraved rituals. Moreno is the guy you go to when...”

“I think I get it,” Evan interjected, since Titus seemed to be struggling with deciding whether to continue. “Your turn.”

Titus tapped his fingers on the table for a moment, then looked Evan in the eye. “How smart are you?”

The scars on Evan's face squirmed around as he actually smirked. “What kind of question is that?”

“Hey, we agreed no 'whys'.”

“Alright, alright. Well, there's really no objective metric for it, but... I have Master's degrees in computer science and theoretical physics, Bachelor's in those in addition to mathematics and electrical engineering, and associate's degrees and certificates in everything from EMT training to ballet. I should have my doctorate in physics, but...” he said, with a bitterness that Titus made a note of, then changed gears. “Oh, and I also speak Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Arabic pretty fluently. I also know ASL. I can get by in German and Russian, too. I don't know if any of that is what you meant but--”

“Jesus, I get it,” Titus muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “How the fuck do you make money?”

“Software consulting, mostly. I specialize in security and processing efficiency. People pay me to break into their systems and then patch the holes, or to make their code run quicker or make their programs smaller. I've got a few patents I've licensed that bring in most of my income nowadays, though.”

“Anything I would have heard of?”

“If you've used a computer made in the last four years it probably has something I wrote integrated somewhere into it. I also helped develop a protein-sequencing program that helped develop a vaccine for this nasty SARS variant that broke out in China last year. They say if they hadn’t nipped it in the bud it could’ve spread worldwide and we’d be looking at millions of deaths by now.”

Titus scrunched up his face. “Oh yeah, just say that like it’s no big deal.”

“I’m just glad it turned out not to be one. What I'd really like to do is get my compression algorithm out there, but if I do that, somebody's going to try to hoard it all for themselves.”

“Are you talking to yourself or me?”

“Look, I... a few years ago I figured out a way to compress memory down by a exponential factor of six with zero loss. All it takes is a couple software plugins that don't take up much room themselves. Essentially, I could make a gigabyte fit in a kilobyte with very little trouble, now that the math's figured out.”

“Holy fuck, that's insane! Why haven't I heard anything about this?”

“Mainly because I don't tell people. If I put it up on the market, some ISP would buy it and bury it. If you make information smaller, you make it faster. Can you imagine what it'd do to internet access if dial-up and barebones cellular networks suddenly had the bandwidth of fiber optics? It would... maybe not revolutionize our society, but it would level a lot of playing fields. Bring a lot of underdeveloped areas of the world—hell, this country—up to modern levels with no extra cost. The telecomms would crash and burn so hard. But I don't have the means to get it out there without going through someone else. Yet,” Evan added. “So I basically work watered-down versions of the compressor into the software I make. Nothing that can be duplicated, and nowhere near its full potential, but enough to get me hailed as some kind of genius and pay the bills.”

“So why aren't you on your own private island or something somewhere instead of puttering around God's Ashtray in a shitty old Bug?”

“Hey, the Beetle is not shitty,” Evan said, defensively. “And I'm just waiting for the AC in my RV to get fixed or I'd be driving that.”

“Oh hot damn! Now that's the way to live!”

“Not the one I'd choose voluntarily, but it could be worse.”

“How come you're doing it, then?”

“I think it's my turn to ask,” Evan said, mildly.

“Fine,” Titus said grumpily, crossing his arms.

“How do you make money?”

“That's easy. I'm basically a freelance bailbondsman. I just roam around, drop my advertising around bars and courthouses.”

“You get many clients that way?” Evan asked, cocking his remaining eyebrow.

“Oh, you'd be amazed how desperate people can get,” Titus said, shrugging. “Of course, they're usually not the most responsible people, so when they bounce, I track 'em down myself, drag ‘em back to jail, get the money back. My eye usually makes it super easy. Sometimes they don't even see me before I get the cuffs on 'em.”

“Why did you feel the need to rob a bunch of drug dealers, then? The thrill of it?”

“I had a pressing need for a large amount of cash that my normal work doesn't bring in. That got me enough to hold it off for a while. My turn.”

Evan waved down a waitress for a refill of his coffee, trying not to take it personally when she gasped upon seeing his face. “Go ahead…”

“No, no, hang on.” Titus waved a hand dismissively. “I want to try something. Take your hair out of the ponytail.”

“What? Why?”

“Humor me.”

Evan groaned and reached back, removing his hair tie. After shaking his head, his hair fell over his face, obscuring everything but his nose and mouth. Titus pursed his lips and regarded him seriously for a moment.

“Can you see?”

“Yeah, I guess. Well enough to not walk into things, I think, and I could probably read if I had to.”

Titus snapped his fingers. “Good. Go with that from now on.”

“Why?”

“Because now you don’t look like God’s mistake. Now you look like a big, dumb-but-lovable goon. Like Jack Black would voice you in a cartoon.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Do you like seeing people contemplating their own mortality and the general cruel absurdity of the tragic farce that is human existence when they get a glimpse of your face?”

Evan felt his cheeks burn and was actually grateful his hair was covering most of his face. “…not particularly, no.”

“Then there you go. You’re welcome. Okay, question time. Uh… how did you get your powers?”

“Which one?”

“Oh, now who’s arguing in bad faith? Fucking all of them, you thick-lipped gargoyle.”

Evan had the feeling he hit a sore spot. Titus's easy-going, jocular tone had bled away from him, leaving behind the hard-edged razor-blade of a man that had ambushed him the night before. He decided not to belabor the point.

“I don't know why I can rege—why I heal so quickly. No, I'm serious, as far as I know, it just started happening sometime in the past few months. I can't remember. Don't look at me like that, I'll get to that in a minute. When I was younger I recovered from a lot of injuries a lot quicker than the doctors thought I would, so maybe it's something I was born with and it just got stronger recently for some reason.”

Evan took a sip of coffee, mainly to buy a few seconds to think of how much to explain for the next part.

“The ability to shut off powers... that's part of, well, I guess you'd call it a magic ritual, because I don't know what else to call it. I found a weird old book that said it contained the key to making someone an instrument of universal justice, or something of the sort. Since then I can see... I guess they're souls? Maybe? I can sort of move mine and when I run it into someone else's it seems like I can shut off their powers. Or... take them entirely, if they're dying.”

“Horseshit!” Titus scoffed. “That's... that's like meta-magic. I don't even know if that's real.”

“No, seriously! I don't think it's just magic powers, I think it... 'normalizes' things.” He briefly recounted his encounter with the pain monster.

“Are you kidding me? That...” Titus took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, exhaling slowly and loudly. “Look, I don't know much, but the fact that you even ran into something like that, let alone survived... those odds are astronomical. And you say you negated not just its powers, but its whole form?”

“Yeah. Once I... reached into it, like I did with you—oh don't make that face. Grow up—I kind of disrupted what made it... different, I guess? Like I cut it off from its special qualities. Like it was...”

“Disjuncted,” Titus cut in.

“Yeah, that's a good word for it. Like the old Mordenkainen spell?”

“Fucking nerd.”

“Eat my ass. Anyway, after I killed it, I was able to reach into its... soul? Animating force? Aura? I don't know what to call it. I was able to grab something and pull it out and it just got pulled into me.”

“Not aura.”

“What?”

“Aura's a different thing,” Titus said, dismissively. “So what did you get from doing that?”

“I.. I feel pain differently. I don't flinch or get adrenaline rushes from injuries that don't actually impede my ability to function. I think I have a better sense of what is actually dangerous to my body now. It still hurts, but I don't react to pain like people normally do. It's like...hmm.” Evan drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you know anything about video games? Fighting games, specifically?”

“I used to fuck around on an old Alpha 3rd Strike cabinet when I was a kid. Why?”

“Do you know what 'super armor' is?”

“Isn't that where a move can't get stopped by being hit when you're doing it?”

“Right. I'm kind of like that now. Pain doesn't interrupt me.”

“Fucking nerd.”

Evan's fist involuntarily clenched. “I'm trying to put this in terms you can understand, you stupid reprobate. My experience with your judgment thus far hasn't given me much faith in your intellect.”

Titus burst out laughing. “So he does know how to banter! I thought you might be one of those Rainman types.”

“Oh sure, call it 'banter' to try to excuse the fact that you've been insulting me for the past half hour. Do you say you're ‘just joking’ when people get mad at you for saying stupid shit, too?”

“C'mon, lighten up! We're partners now! Tell me more about this soul thing. I still think you're full of shit.”

Evan sighed through his nose, then held up his left hand, forming his fingers into a circle and peering through them.

“Yours is... a sort of cross between a sea green and an oil slick. The tendrils of it keep reaching out and snapping back, going all over the place. It seems to keep expanding and contracting. It's almost flickering, like... it's indecisive. Very chaotic. The tendrils that aren't snapping around seem to be kept pretty close to your body, wrapping around you like... I can't tell if it's protective or restrictive.”

Titus's expression slowly became serious. “What does that mean?”

“I don't know. I have a lot of theories, but nothing solid to go on. I'm not sure if it's allegorical or a literal representation of a person's... power, maybe? Yours definitely looks a lot different than most people's.”

“I don't believe this for a second. Let me see.”

“How would I do tha—hey!”

Titus grabbed Evan's wrist and held his hand up to his eye. “Ho-lee...”

He pulled back from Evan's hand, staring at him. Then he looked around the room, mouth slack as he took in the diner's other occupants.

“Huh. Did you know it keeps working until you blink?” He said after a moment, a faraway tone to his voice.

“I didn't even know other people could do it,” Evan said, awe in his voice. “Hey, wow, you're right!”

“Jesus, yours is, like, really blue. It looks like... a bunch of steel cables. It's weird, I felt like I both could and couldn't see the edges of it...”

“I can kind of move it, but I'm not sure if I can do anything with it beyond interfering with people's powers. It's like learning to use a muscle you didn't know you had.”

“Huh.” Titus was again silent for a long moment. “Your turn.”

“Can you do anything else supernatural? Besides your time-eye?”

“Don't call it that, it sounds stupid. And... sorta. I seem to have whatever innate talent you need to actually do magic, but it's not like it's easy to find instructions. Most of the people I know who can use it just dabble with half-broken magic items—wands, amulets, charms,” he pulled the silence charm out from under his coat and bounced it at the end of its chain. “I guess I'm sort of a dabbler. I know a few tricks, I can use a lot of magic tools, I can sense magic pretty well, I can dowse... Most of the time I really never have to use anything besides the eye, though.”

“Is the eye all-or-nothing?”

“Yeah. It's not nearly as useful as you'd think, but any edge is an edge.”

“When I turned off your power and it was coming back, though, you started speeding up—or, I guess, everything else was slowing down? You were moving faster, one way or the other. You were able to touch me, and those punches hurt.”

“Huh, yeah, you're right.”

“Do you think there's a way you could learn to only partially activate it?”

“That'd be great, wouldn't it? Thing is, just using it is a huge strain, and that time spend outside of time adds up. Going by normal calendar time I'm only 26.”

“Fuck, I'm 27!” Evan laughed.

“Yeah, well, I'd rather be prematurely gray than what you've got going on. My turn. Uh... huh, I can't really think of anything else. Uh... are you gay?”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“No, but the question still counts.”

“I'm bi,” Evan mumbled, crossing his arms across his prodigious chest. “Not that it matters. And before you ask, no, you are not my type. We're done talking about this.”

“Huh. You ever sucked--”

“We. Are. Done. Talking about this.”

“Fine, God. Go.”

Evan mentally circled back to an earlier question he felt hadn't been properly answered. “Why are you after Moreno?”

To Evan's surprise, Titus didn't hesitate. “I'm actually after his current boss. He's just the best lead I have to go on.” He took a deep breath, then started talking with a rushed, deadpan pace, as if he was eager to get the words out as quickly as possible so they wouldn't be in his mouth very long.

“Moreno is working for a guy only known as the Soultaker. He has an innate supernatural ability to pull a person's soul out of their body. When that happens, the person just... shuts down, usually. No motive force behind them. Eventually they just die of dehydration, usually. I've seen some people so set in routine that they keep going without a soul, but... it's not really life.

“It seems like the extraction process takes a while, so he can't just walk past you on the street and pickpocket your entire essence. So he needs people rounded up for him, held until he can do his nasty juju. So that's where a degenerate like Moreno comes in.

“So when he pulls out a soul, it, well, it looks like this.”

Titus pulled a battered, faded Crown Royale bag out of his jacket. It bulged strangely and made a quiet clacking when he set it on the table. He pulled out what looked like a large marble, or maybe a dull pearl, and handed it to Evan.

Evan brushed his hair out of his eyes and peered into the milky depths of the sphere. After a few moments of staring, the murky clouds inside the thing seemed to clear and a face floated to the surface. A black man, maybe in his late 40s, going thin on top. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but his expression had a look of discomfort to it, as if he was having a bad dream.

“Jesus Christ,” Evan whispered, “I've seen this guy... Martell Calloway? I saw some news article about how his family found him tied up in his apartment and completely comatose! But he didn't have any injuries beyond being a black eye... so he's dead?”

“Life support,” Titus said, taking Mr. Calloway's soul back from Evan's unresisting fingers, “technically, he's one of the lucky ones. They found his body before it wasted away to nothing, and I was able to intercept his soul before it got to a buyer.”

“Why would someone buy something like this? What use is it? Can you fix him?”

“A human soul is a damn near exhaustible arcane battery,” Titus said gravely. In the split second between sentences, Evan noticed something—after he'd put the bag back into his jacket, Titus surreptitiously touched a pocket on the other side of his jacket, as if he was making sure something was still there.

“If you know what you're doing, you can power a lot of magic using a soul. And you can reuse them as long as you don't overdo it. If you know what you're doing, you can wring all but the last drops of essence out of a soul and let it heal or recover or whatever, and it'll eventually be back to full strength. Very resilient things,” Titus continued. “I don't think they're conscious in there, but... anyway, it's supposed to be really hard to extract a soul. But this guy was born with or spontaneously developed or somehow figured out a shortcut to the whole process. So the market is getting flooded with torture-batteries and ECUs are getting flooded with vegetables. And families are winding up with loved ones who are as good as dead, without having any idea why this happened to them. Dozens of them have been taken off life support in the past few months. Half these souls have no body to return to. And no, I can't fix it. At least not yet,” he sighed again. “I was hoping once I found him, I could somehow get the secret out of him or force him to put them back, or... maybe I thought if I killed him it'd reverse the effect. He needs killing, either way.”

Titus's eye widened as a thought struck him and he looked Evan in the eye for the first time since he'd started the story. Evan realized what he was thinking and looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, flexing his fingers.

“If you can take people's powers after they die...”

“...then we can save these people.”

Titus put a hand over his mouth and for a moment Evan thought he saw his eye well up.

“I'm in,” Evan said, a sense of righteous purpose welling in his heart. “I don't really know what the universe wants, but I doubt... I know it's not this. We'll find him, we'll stop him, and we'll save as many of these people as we can.”

“...thanks,” Titus mumbled behind his hand. He swallowed hard, then seemed to come back to himself. “We're back to square one, though.”

“You said you could dowse? Like, for real?”

“Yes, for real. I can find things and people with the pendulum method. It's handy for tracking down bounties.”

“Why don't you dowse Moreno?”

“Why didn't I think of that?!” Titus said incredulously, smacking his forehead. “Because he's warded. He's not magic himself, but he's collected enough gear through his career that my normal methods don't work.”

Evan rubbed his chin. “What if we used an abnormal method?”

-------------------

An hour later, they were in the RV. Titus was poring over the collection of Evan's notes and the strange papers he'd bought from Delmann's shop. Evan was very carefully slicing a strip of skin from his own ankle up all the way up his leg. The Guiding Light—the Finder's Follysat on the table between them, filled with fresh blood.

“Even if this works, he's going to know we're coming,” Titus muttered, engrossed in the pages. “Remember what I said?”

“That's why we're not going to look for him,” Evan said, adjusting his grip on the potato peeler. “I don't know how we'd even write his name. Can you read that, by the way?”

“Kind of. This is... most of this is written in, like, arcane pidgin. Who compiled these notes?”

“I did, I think.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to clarify on that. Apparently a couple months ago, before the ritual, I drilled a hole in my own brain to erase some kind of very dangerous memory.”

“You what.”

“That's not a metaphor or anything. Really did it. I could show you the video.”

“I'll pass. So you don't remember where this came from?” Titus shook the Book of Fate at him.

“Nope.”

“Jesus shit, do you have any idea--”

“How reckless that was? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here and I'm the answer to your fuckin' prayers, aren't I?” Evan gave a whoop as the peeling skin reached his thigh. “Got it this time!” he said cheerfully, snipping the flesh-ribbon off with scissors.

“God, that's so fucking gross. Anyway, you haven't explained how we're going to use that thing to find Moreno.”

“We don't set it to look for him. We look for somewhere he's been. Maybe the last place he slept. Do you think you can describe him well enough in that language for it to work?”

Titus looked like he might actually be impressed, but he hid it well. “Yeah, probably.”

“Good. I've got a dictionary I've put together on that tablet next to you, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe it'll help?”

---------------------

Two hours later, they had it.

Find where a man born between the 27th and 28th north parallels during a new moon under the sign of capricorn with black hair and green eyes who has killed at least 10 people slept in the past week.

They really had to squeeze the letters in, but when Evan put a flame to the wick, it sprung to life, wavered for a moment, and then pointed east. Both men cheered. Evan threw Titus the keys.

“Drive! Drive north until I tell you otherwise!”

While Titus started the engine, Evan spread a map of the United States on the table in front of the lamp, then produced a protractor and a notebook from a drawer. “Okay, you bastard... let's see where you've been hiding...”

It took three days—one spent driving north, one spent driving back to where they'd started, and one spent driving south. While Titus drove, Evan made meticulous notes of the flame's direction, marking angles on the map. Finally he threw the pencil down triumphantly.

“He's in Salt Lake City.”

“Well, that narrows it down a little, I guess. So what, do we just go there and hope this thing points us in the right direction?”

“Too slow,” Evan called, stepping back into what used to be his bedroom and sitting at his computer. “Now I work my magic.”

After parking, Titus walked back to look over Evan's shoulder. The half-dozen monitors on the wall were flickering between rapidly-changing pictures of faces and what appeared to be CCTV footage.

“What is this?”

“This,” Evan said with dramatic pride, “is Blaccat. Facial recognition algorithms that the CIA wishesit had. I actually started working on it years ago before I thought about the implications of it, but I shelved it. I figured since I may be needing to, uh...”

“Be Batman?”

“...yeah...that I should get back to work on it. Right now it's comparing faces to the description you gave me and cycling through every damn security camera in the city looking for it.”

“How illegal is this?”

“Soooooo illegal.”

“Oh, hey, can you get into police department records?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

“See if you can get into the Las Vegas mugshots from... February 2019. Run your face-recognition thingy there.”

“Alright.... and... is that our boy?”

A handsome Latino man in his early 30s with shoulder-length jet-black hair and piercing green eyes stared at them from over a booking clipboard.

“That's him,” Titus breathed.

“Perfect! Now I just have to feed that into... wow.” Evan made a gesture and a black and white video popped up on the biggest monitor. The man in the mugshot was walking along the street, flanked by a short stocky man in bandanna and a lanky man with the ugliest white-boy dreads Evan had ever seen.

“That's him! Where is that? When is that?”

Evan grinned up at Titus. “That's live. I can track him and put us at the nearest intersection.”

Titus smiled, eye overbright, and began breathing heavily through his nose. “We got him.”

Pain has a way of fading from the forefront of your mind when you’ve been feeling it long enough, becoming a sort of discordant background noise; still present enough to make every other experience difficult and miserable while not being the focus itself.

What Evan was feeling wasn’t that. His missing eye, his severed fingers, his masticated ankle and now his left tit were all parts of a very noisy argument, each agony clawing at and clambering over the others to try to be the loudest voice in the room.

His stomach felt nearly concave. The signals from the few uninjured parts of him were so fuzzy and indistinct that he might as well have had two tin cans and a piece of twine for a nervous system. He could barely breathe. His throat felt like it was the size of a swizzle stick. His face burned from where his own gore had dried on his skin, combined with the grit of… sand?

He opened his eye just in time for a shovelful of more sand to hit him directly in the face. He sat up, coughing and moaning.

“Shitting dicks!”

Evan turned his head towards the unusual exclamation. Eyepatch was standing a couple of feet from him, a shovel rattling to rest at his feet.

Evan tried to take in his surroundings. It was still dark. He was outside. There were stars in the sky but a very faint hint of pink on the horizon. He couldn’t see a road. His Volkswagen was parked about thirty feet away. There was very little vegetation. He was sitting in a hole a couple of feet deep, half-covered with sand and dry dirt.

“You call this a grave?”

That was what he meant to say, but what came out of his tight, sticky-dry throat was something like “Yyyccchhhggggghhh.”

Evan planted his hands on the sides of the grave and pushed himself up. He still couldn’t move his right foot and his fingers were still gone, but at least he was alive. He managed to drag himself out of the grave and onto his left foot, then held out his hand toward Eyepatch. “Ksss.”

His would-be killer gawked at him. “What?”

“KSSS!” Evan wheezed emphatically, gesturing at his car. “KRR KSS!”

“Oh. Oh!”

Eyepatch fumbled in his pockets, then tossed Evan a familiar, clinking mass. Evan would have caught it, but the bundle slipped through the gap where his fingers were supposed to be and clattered into the dusty dirt. Evan glared at Eyepatch, who hissed awkwardly through his teeth. Grumbling, Evan bent down and retrieved the keys, then hop/stumbled towards his car and opened the trunk. Under the fold-out workbench, he found a blessedly full gallon jug of water. Popping the lid off, he tilted it back and began to guzzle it down. Only a little more than half was actually going in his mouth, but the overflow washing off some of the blood and sand felt good. After the jug was nearly empty, Evan reached back into the trunk and came up with a handful of five-inch-long protein bars, which he tore open with his teeth and took bites out of as many as he could at once. Then he sat down on the bumper and chewed.

There was a period of several minutes where nothing was said or done, except for Eyepatch idly kicking the dirt as he looked on while Evan grunted and noisily devoured a few thousand calories in an almost primal fashion.

Evan burp-retched after the eighth bar, wincing as the pain in his wounds began to play itself in reverse. Food. It’s powered by calories, of course. How… pedestrian,he thought, grumpily.

“So,” he said, finally, causing Eyepatch to jump, “are we done?” “Huh?”

“You’re not gonna try to kill me again, right?”

Eyepatch sheepishly exhaled out of the side of his lips. “Nnno. I pretty much confirmed that you’re not who I thought you were.”

“What gave it away?”

“Well, the wallet full of fake IDs—very convincing ones, by the way, remind me to ask who made them—didn’t do much to dissuade my ‘hired goon’ theory, but then I saw what you wrote on the Finder’s Folly,” Eyepatch said, slowly walking around the grave. “Plus, the stuffed giraffe sorta hinted at someone who doesn’t kill people for fun.”

Evan’s chest tightened. “What did you do with Mr. Nex?” he asked, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

To his credit, Eyepatch at least attempted to muffle the snort. He crouched down by the grave and reached into the dirt, coming up with a dirty but intact floppy yellow bundle of cloth. Somewhat tentatively, he walked towards Evan, holding the stuffed animal out in front of him like a man reaching out to pet a dog he’s not entirely convinced is friendly.

Evan looked him over for a moment. In the light, he… well, he didn’t look much different. He was wiry and weatherbeaten, like a well-seasoned scarecrow. He carried himself with a sense of potential energy, like he was constantly about to make a sudden move, but he didn’t seem particularly tense. His hair was a medium brown that mixed with some gray around his temples, with a mustache-less goatee and thin eyebrows to match. Stubble connected his facial hair to his sideburns, but Evan couldn’t tell if that was a styling decision or a lack thereof.

“I figured it only made sense to bury him with you. Seemed like the least I could do, considerin’.”

“That’s… almost sweet. Thank you, I guess.”

Evan slowly reached up and took Mr. Nex from him, tucking the giraffe under his arm. A moment later, he reached back into the trunk for another, smaller bottle of water. Eyepatch slowly sidestepped until he was at the other end of the bumper, then sat down, keeping his eye on Evan the whole time. Eventually, he spoke.

“…this is pretty awkward.”

Evan swallowed and chuckled darkly. “I’m pretty sure this is something on a whole other spectrum of socially uncomfortable,” he said. He flexed his right foot; the tendon seemed to be back to a functional level, and he was starting to be able to discern light out of his left eye. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have my fingers, would you?”

Eyepatch stood up and patted his pockets in turn, pausing when he reached his right side. Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out a bloody handkerchief wrapped around something. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Didn’t think it was good to leave obvious evidence behind.”

“Shit, we left that room a mess.”

“Don’t worry about it, I gave the manager a couple thousand to cover it when I checked you out.”

“Decent of you.”

“Well, it was on your card.”

“Bastard,” Evan muttered, though there wasn’t much actual vitriol behind it. He unwrapped the fingers, comparing them to the stumps. After rinsing off the raw, gooey spots with water, he held the fingers against the aching wounds. Neither man spoke for nearly a minute, then Evan pulled his right hand away and flexed his left hand into a fist.

Eyepatch whistled. “Damn, simple as that? Good as new?”

“They kinda feel like they’re asleep, but I think they’ll be good soon.”

“How come you can do that?”

“It’s not really a ‘can do’ thing, it just happens. No idea. I’m still learning.”

“Is your nipple gonna grow back?”

Evan looked down at his left pec. Where there had been a pert pierced nipple was now a sunburst of scar tissue. He poked at it, cautiously. There was no titillating tingle, only the blunt yes/no sensation of pressure on his skin. “God damn it!”

“What the hell’s up with your tits, anyway? You got some kind of hormone imbalance? I’ve seen chicks with implants smaller—”

“It’s all fucking muscle, okay? I’m just built thick! My whole family is!”

“Huh. You got a sister?”

“Oh, fuck you.”

Evan bit into another protein bar. All things considered, he’d come out of the whole encounter mostly intact—he could basically see out of his left eye by now—but the loss of his nipple really bothered him for reasons he was embarrassed to think about. So rather than think about it, he decided to talk.

“So who are you, anyway?”

Eyepatch seemed to consider the question for longer than necessary, but eventually he said, “Titus. My name’s Titus.”

“I’d say it’s nice to meet you, Titus, but nice meetings don’t usually involve a shallow grave.”

“Hey, that grave was plenty deep for the circumstances, thank you very much. It’s harder to bury a guy in sand than you’d think,” Titus said, a hint of wounded pride in his voice. “Plus, after I dragged your heavy ass out here—”

“In my car.”

“…in your car, because I drive a motorcycle, two feet is all I really had the energy to manage.” Titus winced and put his hand to his left side. “Plus, I think you bruised a couple of my ribs.”

“You fuckin’ bit pieces off me, ripped out my eye, and shot me with my own gun. You got off easy.”

“I don’t patch back together like some kinda… meat machine, though. And don’t forget how you squashed my fuckin’ nuts.”

“Oh, sorry, next time I’m yanked out of the time stream I’ll think of a more gentle way to deal with it,” Evan snapped.

That seemed to shut Titus up for a moment. He stared at the sand for a little while, then asked, “So what’s your name?”

“Well, you said you saw all my IDs. One of them’s real.”

“The card I paid with said ‘Evander G. Abrams’ but that’s a fake name if I’ve ever heard one. I’m guessing… ‘Babak Ervin’.”

Evan burst out laughing. “Oh man, I hardly ever use that one! You had it right the first time.”

“Seriously? But it’s such a…”

“White name?”

“That’s not what I was gonna say, but since you brought it up, yeah, kinda, unless you count Holyfield. What the hell ethnicity are you, anyway?”

“Wow, you don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“I just watched a man I thought I wrongfully killed climb out of a grave and piece himself back together. You’ll have to excuse me being a bit indelicate.”

“You don’t strike me as that type who’s ever delicate.”

“Hey, fuck you, pal. This whole thing ain’t been a picnic for me, either. So your name really is Evander?”

“I just go by Evan.”

“Fine then, Evan it is.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“Okay.”

“Alright.”

“…do you hear that? Sounds like an engine.”

Titus cocked his head, then froze. “Oh shit.”

“What?”

Titus jumped off the bumper. “We gotta get outta here. Now! Close the trunk!”

Evan stood up, mainly to keep Titus from closing the trunk on him. “What’s going on?”

“Some very unpleasant people are on their way! Oh shit, you can see them, look!” Titus pointed towards the horizon. In the near-dawn almost-light, Evan thought he could see a plume of dust moving their way. “Get the keys and let’s go!”

“Okay, okay! You’re bossy for someone who just killed me,” Evan grumbled, walking around to the driver’s side.

“Well clearly it wasn’t that big of a fucking deal, so quit your bitching and drive or we’re both gonna be cactus food!”

“Jeeeesus,” Evan muttered, getting into the car. “Augh, you fucked with the seat and the mirrors? Seriously?”

“START THE FUCKING ENGINE.” Evan jammed the key in, cranked it, put the car in gear, and pressed the gas. “What way’s the quickest way to the… uh-oh.”

Skrrrrrr. Vzzzzzzz. Ssskrrrrt.

“Come on! Why aren’t we moving?!”

“Because you drove a VW Bug God-knows-how-far into the fucking Mojave! We sunk into the sand! I can’t get traction!”

“Aren’t Bugs off-roaders? I thought these things were supposed to be good rally cars!”

“The classic ones, yes, and if they’re kitted that way, yes! I don’t even drive this thing in the winter in central Ohio!”

“Well do something!” Titus sounded like he was on the edge of panic. Evan swung his door open. “Get behind the wheel. I’ll push. And if you leave me…”

“I’m not gonna, Christ! Just do it!” Titus shouted, clambering into the driver’s seat.  Evan crouched down behind the Bug and leaned his back against it, digging his heels into the sand. He threw his weight against it as Titus floored the gas, but all that got him was his calves sandblasted by the spinning wheels.

“Okay okay okay, stop stop stop!” Evan yelled after two knee-straining, back-breaking minutes of pushing and listening to his engine whine. “This isn’t working! We gotta try something else!”

“Well what do you suggest?” Titus screamed from the driver’s seat, nearly hysterical. “We have a rapidly shrinking window of time within which it is okay to be here!”

“Who are these guys, anyway?” Evan asked, squinting at the five—he could make them out clearly now—figures rapidly approaching them.  He could hear the roar of engines.  This didn’t make him feel a particularly strong sense of urgency—Maybe he was tired. Maybe he’d already subconsciously decided they weren’t going to get out of there in time.

Or maybe a small, sadistic part of him was enjoying watching the man who’d mutilated him grow more and more frantic.

“The Billiards MC! A bunch of drug-running shithead bikers! Real vicious bastards!” Titus yelled, flinging open the car door and nearly falling out. He crouched by the car’s forward fender, drawing his pistol and glancing nervously over the hood.

“And they’re coming for us why?” Evan asked, slowly stepping around the front of the car. The roar of the motorcycle engines was growing louder.

“It’s a long story, but the Cliff Notes version is I blew up their meth lab.”

“Huh. Lot of that going around lately,” Evan said absently. “So you don’t think you can take them?”

“Jesus Christ, no! Even with my power I won’t be able to get far enough away to keep them from fillin’ me fulla holes! You gotta do something!”

Evan had already intended to, but that little spiteful corner of his soul wanted to make Titus sweat a little more. “And why is that?”

“Because I can give you what you’re looking for!” Titus yelled, anger edging out the fear in his voice. “’Take me to a friend who can teach me about magic’! That’s what you wrote on that damn lamp! That’s me! I know some shit! I can teach you!”

‘A friend’? That’s what that translated to?  Evan grinned. “Well, hell, all right then! I guess we have an—”

The bullet smacked into his left shoulder and went clear through. He could see the bikers now, and it turned out one of them as actually two—and the rider was sighting down a rifle over the driver’s shoulder. Mostly for effect, Evan grabbed his already-healing shoulder and dove behind the car next to Titus. “Okay, so—these guys don’t have some kind of pool-themed power set, do they?”

“What? No! No, that’s stupid! No, they’ll all just normies with guns and knives!  Their founder’s name is William Yard!  Bill Yard! Billiards!”

Evan’s face went slack. “That’s… that’s actually kinda clever,” he said, grudgingly. “So are they going to try to shake you down, or are they ‘kill on sight’ mad at you?”

Titus peeked up through the driver’s side window. “Good question… I put a couple of their guys in traction and stole a couple hundred thousand bucks in addition to the whole ‘blowing up the lab’ thing…”

“A ‘couple hundred’ thousand?!”

“Yeah, and that’s not easy as it sounds, either. You know how much cash that is, especially when it’s in small bills? I had to balance three duffel bags on my bike and--”

“Sorry to interrupt, but that’s not really pertinent right now!” Evan hissed. “Should we—well, you start shooting now?”

“They’re probably gonna try to get me to give back the money, but that’s already long gone.” Titus exhaled heavily and sat back against the door. “Look, maybe if we go out there you can at least keep them from surrounding us completely. I’ll try to talk to them, but I’m guessing that’s gonna go to shit pretty quick. After that it’s up to you, okay?”

“Alright, fine. Just get clear and I’ll do my best. Put the gun away and let’s get out there.” --------------- The plan worked, insofar as there was an actual plan. When Titus and Evan stood up and walked around the car with their hands up (Evan still holding his ‘wound’), the bikers stopped in a semicircle around them instead of completely encircling them. His hands still raised, Titus stepped forward to, as he’d put it, ‘work my magic’.

“Heeeyyyy, guys! Great timing! I was just—” Blam-kssh!

Evan jerked forward, almost forgetting that he was supposed to be wounded. “…you did not just shoot my fucking window out, you son of a—"

“Hey-hey-hey whoa whoa whoa!” Titus cut in, holding a hand out in front of Evan. “There’s no need for any of that, 8-Ball, we can come to—”

“Where’s our fucking money, Finnegan?” 8-Ball said, his gravelly voice oddly quiet. He seemed to Evan to be the leader of this little band, and he looked for all the world like “Biker #1” right out of central casting. He was heavyset, bordering on fat, but was obviously packing some serious muscle under his leathers and huge bushy beard in addition to the .44 that was smoking in his hand. His namesake, set in the mouth of a fanged, fiery-eyed skull, was tattooed on the front of his bare belly, which Evan had to admit was a pretty striking commitment to a personal aesthetic.

“I’m getting to that, I’m getting to that!” Titus said, pleadingly. “My friend here, he can cover it—”

Evan whipped his head towards Titus, clenching his teeth and glaring. “—here, Evan, let me introduce you to the gang…”

Titus was doing something with his eye. He seemed to be gesturing towards each of the bikers with rapidly movements. Look at them.

Evan decided to play along and tried to size up the bikers without making it obvious that he was trying to calculate the best way to hurt each of them.

“There’s Stick…”

A skinny, pimply guy. Probably the new kid. His bike was too clean, his jacket too shiny, and he didn’t even have a gun; he was holding a Louisville Slugger that looked like it’d never even been used to hit a baseball.

“…Felt…”

A bit on the short side, but nearly as broad as Evan at the shoulder. His curly, short-cropped hair blended into his beard, his chest hair, and as far as Evan could tell, his back hair. He was gripping some kind of jerry-rigged pump-action sawn-off that looked almost as likely to hurt him as whoever it was pointed at.

“…I think that’s English under there…”

Definitely the odd man out. Full racing suit and a mirror-visored helmet. Even his—their? Evan couldn’t even tell—bike was unusual. While the rest of the Billiards rode some variation on the theme of a chopper, English’s bike was a sleek-profiled racer. They were holding some kind of machine pistol in one hand and were idly twirling a switchblade in the other.

“…you’ve already met 8-Ball, and that’s Scratch there with him…”

If 8-Ball was a cookie-cutter biker extra, then Scratch was a perfect “white trash girlfriend”. She was the one who’d shot Evan earlier, and was still holding her rifle as though she intended to swing it up and fire it at any second. She was a very unhealthy-looking skinny, with damaged, stringy hair, prematurely wrinkling skin, and less than an optimal number of teeth. She seemed to be trying to make up for that number in visible track marks and scabs, though. She was open-mouth chewing something that Evan couldn’t identify and was trying very hard not to think about.

“…and hey, who could forget Pockets?”The last member was wearing an open face helmet with goggles and a leather vest over what looked a military flight suit sewn with a truly Liefeldian number of pouches. Evan supposed they were full of spare magazines for the two Glocks he was holding, because he was making clinking noises whenever he shifted his weight.

“…now that we’re all introduced, why don’t I let you guys work out with Evan how you’re going to get your money back, with interest?”

“He ain’t even got clothes,” Stick sneered. This was true; Evan was still in his now blood-splattered heart-print boxers.  “He ain’t got the money.”

“Not on him right now, obviously!” Titus snapped. Evan could see him starting to sweat and his fingers were beginning to twitch. “Look, just let us get back to town and—”

“And nothin’,” 8-Ball rumbled. “If your boyfriend really has the money, well,” he raised his gun again, “we can just dig through his car after he’s dead.” There was a chorus of slides cocking and safeties releasing. Titus made a tch sound.“Well, if that’s how it’s gonna go,” he said, spreading his hands to the side, lowering his head, and freezing. Evan watched intently, eyes wide. Was he about to reveal some other magic?Titus raised his head and grinning at 8-Ball. “Scratch said mine’s bigger.”

Scratch gasped and started to stammer, 8-Ball turned to her with a look of hurt and anger on his face, and for a second, the whole gang was looking away from Titus. In that instant, he vanished. Less than a second later, Evan heard an ‘oof’ from the direction of the grave he’d occupied just half an hour before. Evan wasn’t sure whether to be amused or angry before 8-Ball yelled, “Kill these motherfuckers!”

“Not in front of my fucking caaaarrrrrr-----”

Protect the parts that will incapacitate you if they take too much damage, Evan thought, crossing his elbows in front of his chest and ducking his head behind his forearms. A distressing number of bullets were missing him and hitting his beloved Bug, but there was plenty of lead to go around. The noise was almost worse than the actual pain of getting shot, but Evan quickly noticed, to his disquiet and disgust, that he could tell who hit him by the shape of the bullets punching into his flesh.

Most of the hits were to his abdomen and thighs; his arms turned out to be sturdy enough to keep any lead from getting to his brain or heart, but a well-aimed shot from Scratch blew off a non-trivial chunk of his skull and made both his ears and eyes ring. And sometime during the hail of gunfire, Evan’s favorite boxers were torn from his body, fluttering limply to the ground as a pile of sad, defeated-looking rags.

Then, as the cacophony started to die down, one last blast from Felt’s shotgun knocked Evan’s left leg out from under him and he fell face-first into the dirt.

“Did we get him?”

“How the fuck’s he still movin’?”

“Christ, you see the size of his pecker?”

Evan pushed himself up on his forearms. He hurt, yes, but he was also angry. Angry that his first actual lead had been such a pain in the ass. Angry that he’d lost his boxers and his nipple. Angry that he’d woken up in a fucking hole in the ground and now had to deal with the problems of the guy who’d put him in it. Angry that his dick was getting scraped up from dragging on the sand.

“Go finish ‘im off, Stick.”

Evan raised his head to see that scrawny pimply prick walking towards him, smacking that pristine bat against his bony palm. Evan just knew he was going to say something fucking stupid.

“Eenie, meenie, miney—”

Stick’s obnoxious, outdated, barely-situationally-appropriate pop-culture reference was interrupted as Evan’s right hand swung up and clenched around his balls.

Let us step back for a moment and examine Evan’s fighting capabilities. He was not, at this point in his ‘career’, a martial artist. He was, however, a multi-faceted athlete. From boxing to cross-country running to gymnastics to baseball to wrestling to swimming to soccer to ballet to pole dancing, he had, since he was very young, explored what his body was capable of and refined his control over it until he was certain he could rise to any physical challenge. He was fast, precise, and flexible, and his recent bulking had only added to what he could do with his fine-tuned control over his body.

He was also the carrier of a deep, uncomfortably intense anger. And that, coupled with basic medical training from night classes studying to be an EMT, meant he had spent a lot of frustrated, sleepless nights thinking of very particular and very precise hypothetical methods of hurting people.

And now he had a little shithead’s nuts in his hand, and punchy, angry music playing in his head.

I can feel it on the back of my tongue, all of the words, getting trapped in my lungs

Stick screamed. Evan screamed. And then Evan yanked downward, tearing away a handful of denim and bloody flesh. As Stick folded up, Evan launched himself upwards, swinging his still-clenched fist up into the shrieking kid’s stomach. Then, now on his feet, he grabbed Stick’s sorry excuse for a ponytail, yanked his head back, and delivered a straight-armed downward punch across his jaw, sending him into the dirt in a gurgling, squirming heap.

Heavy like a stone, waiting for the river to run

Evan dug the balls of his feet into the sand and launched himself towards Pockets, who just happened to be the closest biker standing. The bepouched man was struggling to retrieve a fresh magazine for one of his pistols, but his hands were shaking violently. He screamed in terror as Evan bore down on him, head down and kicking up dust like a charging cartoon bull.

With all that metal he's wearing, it’ll be hard to land an incapacitating blow from a standing position. Get him on the ground.

Evan hit Pockets's waist with his shoulder and wrapped his arms around him, lifting the screaming man easily into the air. Still running, he whipped his passenger backwards, then swung their combined weights forwards, knocking the wind noisily from Pockets and winding up on top of him.

I wanna LASH OUT I wanna LET IT OUT

Pockets was screaming for help now, but Evan was hitting his stride and let the momentum of his own personal violence carry him seamlessly into his next move. With his left hand, he grabbed Pockets's helmet and yanked his head to the side, and brought his right elbow down hard where the neck joined the shoulder. Pockets made a wheezing sound, and Evan was back on his feet before he even went slack.

‘Cuz I can feel it on the back of my tongue, on the back of my tongue

Felt was closest, now, and had recovered from the shock of Stick's barehanded castration enough to start attempting to do something about the naked madman brutalizing his fellows with his bare hands. Unfortunately, he decided his best move was to try to load another shell into his shotgun as Evan rushed at him.

His core’s really thick and his center of gravity is low. I probably won’t be able to knock him down easily and body blows won’t cut it. Alley-oop.

Oh, hard to hold this fire inside me

Felt finally slid the shell home and cocked his shotgun, but by time he looked up, Evan was no longer on the ground. He’d swung his left leg forward and up and over across his body, launching himself into the air and twisting around his own vertical axis. By the time Felt realized what was happening, Evan’s right leg had swung around and his right heel hit Felt right in the temple. The hirsute man’s eyes glazed over and he slumped sideways to the ground while Evan landed on all fours and pushed off again, scrabbling at the dirt with his fingers as he lunged along the ground at surprising (to himself, at least) speed.

English stood between Evan and 8-Ball and Scratch. With that full-body suit and that helmet, they’ll be too hard to drop quickly. I’ll save you for later.

Oh, I know, sometimes it’s frightening

Evan hit English in the thighs with his shoulders and set them tumbling over him as he scrambled towards the uncouth couple. To his credit, 8-Ball stepped protectively in front of Scratch. Evan stopped his scuttling, planted his hands in the sand, and swung his legs around. He pointed his toes and kicked 8-Ball in the thigh, but the big man merely grunted angrily and grabbed Evan by the ankle. But as he hauled Evan’s leg upwards, Evan’s other leg came up with it and hooked around the back of 8-Ball’s head. Then Evan tensed his abs, swung himself upwards, and punched 8-Ball square in the face.

Hard to hold this fire inside me

8-Ball let out a yell and released Evan’s ankle, and the Ugly Man brought his other leg around the biker’s neck. He swung himself up further and started to rain blows down on 8-Ball’s scalp as the big man staggered backwards. The sand slipped under 8-Ball’s heels and he went down under the force of Evan’s next punch, but as he fell he managed to wedge an arm up between Evan’s leg and his own face. By the time they hit the dirt, 8-Ball had thrown his considerable weight to the side and swung Evan beneath him, pinning Evan’s thigh to the ground with one beefy forearm. Then he lunged up Evan’s chest and wrapped his hands around his throat.

“You ugly donkey-dicked motherfucker, you’re gonna pay for what you did to my boys—” 8-Ball’s walnut-knuckled fingers were ridiculously strong. Evan grabbed at the callused thumbs, trying to pry the hands off his throat, but 8-Ball’s considerable weight and strength were making it difficult to get any leverage. The two men struggled and grunted and swore at each other until a shadow fell over them.

Evan jerked his head to the side, but the bullet came close enough to his cheek to spray it painfully with flying dirt. 8-Ball looked up and yelled something at Scratch, who was trying to get her rifle lined up with Evan’s forehead. Evan could only guess at what they were screaming at each other, given that all he could hear in the wake of the gunshot was a high-pitched whine, but 8-Ball’s attention was momentarily diverted.

Oh, I know it’s not really like me to

Evan tucked his knees up, braced his feet under 8-Ball’s prodigious gut, and pushed. For a moment, the dawn sky was obscured by 8-Ball’s eponymous tattoo, then there was a brief scream, an oof, and a thud.

Evan got to his knees to see 8-Ball doing the same, panicking over Scratch’s limp form. She looked about as well as you’d expect a 120-pound woman to look after she’d just had a 300-pound man tossed onto her. Her head lolled around on her shoulders as 8-Ball shook her gently, pleading for her to come around. Then Evan, in a move he would later consider to be one of his most heartless, jumped on 8-Ball’s back and slung his arm around his neck.

LASH OUT

8-Ball tried to reach over his shoulders to claw at Evan’s face; Evan, meanwhile, was trying to remember how long you could keep someone in a rear naked choke without actually killing them. After a few seconds that seemed to take several hours, 8-Ball’s blunt fingers stopped scrabbling at Evan’s face and he went slack. Evan breathed a sigh of relief and let up on the pressure.

His shoulder exploded with a hot, wet pain that snaked down his right arm like molten lead. An urgent, insistent pain. It actually hurts! Does that mean I’m already running out of gas?

English’s switchblade was sticking out of his back.  It clearly hadn’t had the effect the mystery biker had in mind, because they jerked back as Evan surged to his feet, snarling. His left hand shot out and grabbed the lapel of English’s racing suit.

I can feel the cork come out of the bottle

And then he yanked hard and swung his head forward.

I can feel the cork come out of the bottle

Again. A spiderweb of cracks formed on English’s mirrored visor.

I can feel the cork come out of the bottle

Again. Now there were more cracks than solid plastic.

I CAN FEEL THE CORK COME OUT OF THE BOTTLE

The knife popped out of Evan’s shoulder as he drew his fist back.

LASH OUT

English’s visor shattered under the force of Evan’s punch, and, from the sound of it, so did their nose. They collapsed in a heap as Evan released his grip. And then it was over. Evan stood in the breaking dawn, naked, covered in blood, muscles bulging and chest heaving from exertion, surrounded by prone and groaning, and in one case, weakly screaming, figures. He’d won. “Yes! Yesyesyesyes!” he hissed to himself, pumping his arms and shaking his hips, dancing to the fading music inside his head. He froze when he glanced up and saw Titus watching him over the edge of what was formerly his grave. Evan cleared his throat, absently brushed some of the sand off himself, and walked over.

“There. It’s done. Can we go?”

Titus sat up. “That was some ugly fuckin’ poetry in motion, my friend,” he said, taking Evan’s hand and pulling himself out of the grave. “So where do we go from here? Cap ‘em all, dig a few more of these babies? Ooh, think we can get ‘em to dig their own?”

“No,” Evan sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Get their guns and let’s get out of here. I think we—”

He was cut off by another long, weak scream from Stick, who was on his knees with his forehead pressed to the ground, hands clamped around his groin.

Evan sighed again. “Or I suppose I should do the good guy thing… still, get their guns and make sure none of them—Goddammit, dude, stop staring at my crotch,” he muttered, blushing.

Titus clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “Jesus, some guys have all the luck.” Evan fixed him with a withering gaze, scars wiggling around his face as he pursed his lips. “Most of the luck,” Titus corrected himself.

---------

“Stop crying, you big fucking baby,” Evan said. “I didn’t even damage your testicles; I just tore the skin on your scrotum. It’ll be fine. Maybe stay off your bike for a couple days. Now bite down on that cloth, this disinfectant spray is going to sting something fierce.”

Titus smiled contentedly at the sound of Stick’s muffled scream, then turned back to Scratch, gesturing with his gun. “Hand it over.”

Scratch, still acting slightly dazed (though Titus wasn’t sure if this was as a result of the fight or just whatever she’d chosen to inhale that morning), clutched the rifle to her chest. “No way! This belonged to my daddy!”

“No, it belonged to my daddy and you stole it from me, you tweaking skank,” Titus said, yanking the rifle away from the pouting Scratch. He gave the gun a cursory inspection, nodded to himself, and looked around.

The Billiards MC were sitting together in the dirt, holding cold packs to various injuries and looking sheepish. Evan had retrieved a spare pair of shorts, to everyone’s relief, and had seen to each of their injuries with an efficient, if not entirely sympathetic, manner. He assured them, with an air of faint menace, that nothing he did would be permanent beyond a few scars. Their weapons, on the other hand, were sitting in a pile several yards away. On the other side of Titus, who now had several guns about his person and a mean look in his eye.

“Alright, he’ll live, and, regrettably, probably be able to reproduce,” Evan said briskly, wiping some blood and other fluids off his hands as he strode away from Stick’s prone form. “Now… what are we going to do about the rest of you?”

The Billiards regarded him uneasily. Titus started whistling tunelessly, spinning a handgun backwards and forwards in his fingers. Evan stared off into the middle distance for a moment, lips pursed to the side, and then snapped his fingers and jogged back to the Bug.  He returned with a worn black duffel bag and tossed it in front of 8-Ball. It went whumpf. “I think that should cover the damages Mr… Finnegan? Caused you,” he said, mildly.

“What?” Titus shouted, staring at Evan with his mouth open, “you’re paying them?!”

“Call it an exchange. Or maybe it's just a ‘I don’t want this stuff in my car’.”

8-Ball was cautiously unzipping the bag, as if he thought it might explode. Once the zipper was open enough for him to peer in, he very reluctantly leaned over the hole and peered inside. Then he swore loudly.

“Holy shit! This—” He unzipped the bag the rest of the way, hauling out plastic-wrapped bricks of powdery white substance. “—this is—holy shit,” he finished, stupefied. “Pockets, check this shit.”

Pockets crawled forward and produced a small knife from one of his namesakes, deftly slitting one of the packages open. Then, with the precision and care of a watchmaker, he produced several inexplicably unbroken test tubes, petri dishes, and a handful of tiny vials of varying colors from his pockets and began arranging them in the dirt.  Titus and Evan shared a look that said: how is this the weirdest part of today?

After a few minutes of things foaming and fizzing and changing color, 8-Ball spoke up. “So what’s it cut with? It better not be fentanyl or we’re gonna have a problem. Selling it. Because that ain’t ethical,” he added hastily as Evan’s knuckles cracked like shifting gravel.

“…nothing.” Patches said, in the hushed tones of a lepidopterist finding an extinct butterfly in his backyard. “It’s… pure.”

“No fuckin’ way,” 8-Ball and Titus said at the same time.

Pockets dipped his finger in the powder and rubbed some on his gums. “Bluh… yeap. Whoa. But this can’t be coke. There’s too much here, it’s… you know what, fuck it.” And then he sprinkled some on the back of his hand and inhaled deeply.

Five minutes later, Evan and 8-Ball managed to get ahold of him and wrestle him to the ground. Pockets was vibrating slightly and cheering and laughing at nothing, though it was slightly muffled because Felt was sitting on his back.

“Well, uh, that’s good enough for me,” 8-Ball said, wiping his forehead. “And we can just have it? You sure?”

“Yeah,” Evan panted, bent double. “Get it out of here. Just don’t do anything stupid with it.”

“Where’d ya even get it?”

“Took it off a gang I beat up in Albuquerque.”

“Wait, that… that wudn’t the Five-Tens, was it?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, we heard they basically broke up a couple days ago! All their guys are in jail or the hospital! Everyone said it had to be rival dealers, but nobody died! I heard some of ‘em were sayin’…”

8-Ball trailed off, staring at Evan with a fresh look of awe and horror. “Yer him. Yer the Ugly Man.”

Evan said nothing. He merely grinned. It was a good menacing grin; he’d spent a few hours practicing it in the mirror. The key was the slow parting of the lips, then the widening; the startlingly white and straight teeth behind the split burnt umber lips, the way his jaw didn’t quite fit together properly, the way the scars seemed to squirm around his face like a nest of worms, the way the edges of his mouth threatened to engulf his ears—it was a masterpiece. That, combined with a slight tilt of the head to drop his eyes into the shadow of his brows and a quiet, guttural chuckle, created a total effect that seemed to dip Evan’s face into the uncanny valley.

8-Ball shuddered. “Jesus. They… we thought they was just all high outta their minds! We didn’t think you was real!”

“Oh, I’m real, all right,” Evan growled, the grin snapping back to a scowl as he grabbed 8-Ball’s jacket. “Now you’re gonna take that coke, and you’re gonna do whatever you want with it, and you’re gonna leave us alone. I don’t give a shit if you sell drugs to people completely capable of making their own bad decisions. But here’s the thing—I’m gonna keep my ears open, and if I ever hear about you shlubs extorting a grieving family like the Five-Tens did I will come down upon you like the wrath of the worst god you can think of. Do-I-make-myself-clear?” 8-Ball managed to nod.

“Good. Now get the hell out of here and spread the word,” Evan said, pushing him away. “Oh, uh… and help me get my car out of the sand.” ---------------------- “Man, you are something fucking else,” Titus laughed dryly. “Trading them drugs you stole off of some other scumbags so they’d stop fucking with me. Of course, beating the shit out of them first probably helped.”

Evan made a slight exhalation of acknowledgement, keeping his eyes on the road.

“So I was thinking—I think we can work something out. You scratch my back, etcetera? I help you find out the things you want to know, you help me with some of the more… hands-on aspects of my work?”

“You mean catch more bullets for you?”

“That might come into play, yes,” Titus admitted, hesitantly, “but think about it—without me you’re just gonna be bumbling around until you trip over something weird, or worse, using dumb cursed crap to try to find out answers and maybe tearing a hole in the fabric of reality in the process.”

“Can that actually happen?”

“See, this is what I mean. You’ve got questions, I’ve got… well, we’ll see what I’ve got. More than you’ve got right now, that’s what matters. We can make this work, kid.”

Evan sighed inwardly. It was a lead. And Titus seemed like he could be at least interesting to be around; he’d just have to make sure to keep an eye on his wallet.

“Let’s get something to eat and talk it over. Healing makes me hungry.”

“There you go! That’s the spirit.”

They drove in silence for a little while longer, only minutes away from the edge of town. Evan started to relax. Maybe this could work.

“Oh yeah, I forgot to ask… what the hell’s wrong with your dick?”

“Take me to someone who can teach me about magic.”

At least, that's what Evan thought he wrote on the skin-wick he'd prepared for the lamp. Bleeding himself wasn’t hard; during his restless, do-everything college years he'd studied to be an EMT in the evenings, and hooking up an IV was child’s play.  Making the wick was a bit messier, but a potato peeler proved effective for procuring a slice of skin of the appropriate size.  The tricky part was deciphering the arcane pseudo-language the lamp required.  Fortunately, some of the symbols in the book he'd gotten from Delman matched those from pre-brain-drill Evan's notes on the Book of Fate, but even so he could only approximate the words.  There were just too many concepts missing from the translation.  

But the wick had inexplicably ignited when held to fire, burning with a disturbingly large and deep red flame that wavered for a moment, then bent at the middle at an uncanny right angle, pointing west.  So west he went.

By the time he'd passed through the Navajo Nation, the flame was pointing decidedly more north. After the third time he filled the lamp (it seemed to burn for about a day per filling), he estimated that it was taking him to central Nevada.

Then the RV's air conditioner broke down.  In the middle of June in the middle of the American Southwest.  Evan found he didn’t mind the heat as much as he used to—a fact that he chalked up to his newfound supernatural vitality—but he was sweating a lot.  It felt wrong to drive much longer with part of his home malfunctioning, so he decided to stop somewhere to get it fixed, if only for the upholstery’s sake.

The lantern burned out about half an hour before he found the appropriate off-ramp, but his priorities had shifted.   The sun was dipping below the horizon and, as it turned out, it was too late for him to get the problem fixed in one day.  He threw a few necessities into the Volkswagen and drove a few blocks across the small town to a motel.

Once he was back in the blessed embrace of air conditioning (okay, maybe he’d missed it more than he had wanted to admit), Evan went through the painful process of re-lighting the lamp.  Something seemed to be wrong, though—the skin caught fire as it had before, but the flame sat fat and squat at the base of the wick.  

Evan sat on the creaky bed and stared at the flame for nearly fifteen minutes, hoping that every little wiggle and twitch of the flame was an indication that it was working again.  Eventually he gave up, dumped the burning blood into the toilet, and went to bed, frustrated.  Tomorrow he’d double-check that he’d gotten the language right and try again.  He had to make it work.

  Evan couldn’t say what woke him up.  He didn’t violently start awake, like he might from a sudden noise—in fact, there was no noise at all save for the air conditioner.  But he was suddenly wide awake, his heart rate picking up speed. He didn’t move except to open his eyes ever so slightly.  What he saw made him inhale sharply and kicked his heartbeat up a notch from ‘pounding’ to ‘hammering’.

By the combination of moonlight and sickly streetlamp light filtering in through the room’s cheap blinds, Evan could see the small entrance hallway in the reflection cast by the window. Something was sliding silently up the door towards the handle.  Moving as quietly as he could, Evan reached over the edge of the bed to where he’d left his clothes and eased his revolver out of its holster.  Then he lay back down, pistol gripped in his right hand under the pillow.

He could see now that the thing moving up the door was a wire with a hook on the end, and he saw then that it wasn’t going for the handle.  Whoever was manipulating it from the other side of the door had done this before; it caught the loop of the swing-bar lock on the first attempt and pulled it away from its bolt.  Then the handle began to turn—the person outside must have already picked the lock. Evan thumbed back the hammer on the revolver as the door opened noiselessly.  

A man slid into the room as soundlessly as he’d opened the door.  Evan couldn’t get a good look at his features, but he could tell that he was nearly as tall as Evan, but much thinner.  He was wearing some kind of hat and had something on his face, but the more important detail was that he was reaching into his jacket and pulling out a gun of his own.

Evan swung his arm out from under the pillow and sat up as fast as he could, levelling the revolver at the man.  

…who wasn’t there.

Something hard pressed against the back of his skull.  

“Put it down.  Nice and easy.”

The voice was measured and calm, but a little louder than Evan would have expected for someone breaking into a motel room in the middle of the night.  Evan slowly raised his left hand and gingerly laid the revolver on the bed with his right, then raised that hand as well. There was a slight shuffling behind him and what Evan had to assume was the barrel of a gun moved away from his head for a moment.  The man was reaching past him with his right hand, moving to pick up Evan’s gun.  

Evan whirled in place, swinging his right arm down to trap the man’s arm.  The man yanked his arm back, causing Evan’s revolver to slide off the edge of the bed and onto the floor.  Evan caught a quick glimpse of the man’s face—tanned and gaunt, a scruffy goatee and sideburns, a medical eyepatch over his right eye (the one-eyed man!), features tightening into an expression of irritated surprise—before the man simply vanished.

There was no flash of light, no puff of smoke, no eye-watering blur of speed, no Bamf. He was just suddenly several feet away from where he’d been, glaring at Evan and holding the pistol at arm’s length. Evan thought he might have felt a small movement of the air, but nothing like what should have been generated from someone moving that fast.

“Real cute, shithead,” Eyepatch growled, his nostrils flaring as he breathed heavily.  “Now if you don’t want me to add a third nostril to that trash fire you call a face, you’re going to—son of a bitch!”

Evan dove off the bed for his gun.  Before he hit the floor, he felt his left arm suddenly yanked back and the landed ungracefully on his face.  Eyepatch was suddenly in front of him again, kicking Evan’s gun away from him and under the dresser.  There was that weird breeze again, too…

“What the hell--?” Evan pushed himself up with his right hand and looked at his left.  His wrist was connected to the bedframe at the foot of the bed by a set of worn-looking handcuffs.  The metal was strangely hot against his skin.  

Before Evan could work out what had happened, Eyepatch kicked him in the side of the head, sending him backwards with his arm painfully stretched over the mattress. Eyepatch was gritting his teeth now, and spoke between deep, hissing breaths.

“Where… the fuck… is Moreno?” he wheezed.  Evan could see sweat beading under the brim of his tweed flat cap.

Evan titled his head. “Who?” he asked, with a tone of confusion that was only partly exaggerated.  

“Do not.  Play fucking dumb.  With me,” Eyepatch hissed.  “Caesar. Fucking.  Moreno.  Your boss. The dipshit who sent your ugly ass after me.”

Evan adjusted himself into a sitting position on the floor.  “Seriously, dude,” he said, holding up both hands, “I don’t know who that—agck!”

It was more of a yelp of surprise than a cry of pain when Eyepatch shot him in the thigh.  It sure hurt more than the .22 to the gut had, though. Definitely a bigger caliber. Though it no longer came as a natural reflex, Evan clamped his hand over the wound (and the hole in his favorite boxers) and hissed through his teeth.

“Jesus, man!  I'm serious!” he gasped.

Eyepatch sneered, then stomped over to the dresser and snatched up the Guiding Light.  “Christ, of course.  Fuckin' amateur hour in here.  I wonder if your boss even knew he was setting you up with a cursed tool.”

That worried Evan a lot more than the bullet fragments he could feel pushing their way out of his thigh.  “The Guiding Light's cursed?”

Eyepatch laughed a sharp, humorless laugh.  “’Guiding Light'?  Fuck, did you seriously believe that something with a name like that was the real deal?  Are you fucking retarded?” He shook his head, chuckling dryly.  “This is a Finder's Folly.  Anyone you search for with this will know you’re coming.  Sure, normies may just write it off as a feeling of foreboding, but anyone who knows dick about shit—which you clearly don’t—knows something's comin' for them.”  He tossed the lamp into the corner with a look of disgust.  “Oh, and speaking of comin' for you, don’t expect anyone to come check up on that gunshot.  Nobody outside this room can hear anything that happens in here.”  He reached in his shirt and let a necklace drop in front of his skinny chest.  A chipped ruby set in tarnished brass glinted faintly in the half-light of the room.

Does everyone have one of those?!

“Is that so,” Evan said flatly.  “Well, I have a magic trick or two of my own.”  He lifted his hand from his leg, revealing the completely healed wound. “Ta-dah!”

It had the effect he’d hoped for.  Eyepatch’s unpatched eye widened in surprise, his mouth started to drop open, and he began to recoil.  Evan didn’t waste the opportunity.  He swung his right hand across his body, grabbed the corner of the bedsheets, and violently yanked them off the bed.  For a moment, the space between Evan and his attacker was completely filled with billowing sheets, and Evan took the opportunity to lunge to his feet. Eyepatch suddenly was on the other side of the bed, panting again.

“What… the fuck… hey! What the hell--"

Evan had planted his left foot on the bedframe and was pulling his left arm back as hard as he could. Veins began popping out along his arm as his bicep bulged in what he hoped was an intimidating fashion.  He looked up at Eyepatch and grinned a theatrically wide grin, his eyes bright and manic.  Then, mostly for effect, he began to yell.

“RrrrrraaaaaaaAAAAAAAA----"

Eyepatch was shouting something and gesturing with his gun, but Evan couldn’t hear him over his own dramatic roaring and the sound of warping metal.  Then, with a ping, the cheap bedframe gave up the ghost and Evan lurched backwards, an unattached handcuff hanging from his wrist.  

Evan and Eyepatch both stared at the dangling cuff.  Evan held it up, gesturing to it as it swung in front of his face.  He waggled his eyebrows.  "Ahh? Ahh? Ahh?"  

Eyepatch gawked for a moment, and Evan seized the opportunity.  He lunged toward the bed, grabbed a bottle of water off the nightstand, and squeezed it.  The flimsy plastic lid burst off under the pressure, sending a spray of droplets towards Eyepatch.  Evan followed them, vaulting over the bed with his other arm.

Eyepatch moved without moving again, but instead of circling around behind Evan again, he moved backwards towards the door.  Evan chuckled inwardly as everything seemed to slow down around him while his brain kicked into high gear.

He moves through the intervening space between his positions, so he's not teleporting.

The air isn't whipped up like it would be if he was moving super fast.  

He moved away from the water instead of through it.  He can't touch or maneuver things while he moves, except what he's got on him.  

It's crazy, but that has to be it!

"I've got you figured out!" Evan roared gleefully, rushing towards Eyepatch with his arms spread wide.  The other man vanished again, but as soon as Evan registered his disappearance, he threw himself backwards and to the side, into a gap he'd left intentionally open. His hip collided with the man's back, and he heard a surprised gasp as his attacker tumbled forward.  The gun clattered to the floor.

Evan spun in place, dramatically pointing a finger in triumph. "You're stopping time, aren't you!"  

 He didn't wait for a response--a suddenly grimace of shocked anger from the prone man told him all he needed to know.  He dove towards the man and managed to get a hand around his ankle.  Then something unexplainable shifted.

Everything went dark. All Evan could see were grayscale outlines of the room, lit by light that didn't seem to quite reach any surface. It seemed like the beams of streetlight shining in through the window were caught in their own shadow, which gave him vertigo to even try to comprehend.  When he involuntarily gasped at the realization that he was literally out of time, his lungs failed to inflate.

There's no air here! he realized, fighting rising panic.  Of course--nothing can move!  He has to hold his breath when he does it!  That's why he was getting so winded!  

Fighting the urge to grab his throat, Evan raised his head to look at his opponent.  It was difficult; the air felt like it was an infinitely thick chunk of wet cardboard.  The blood was pounding in his ears by the time he managed to raise his gaze, and he felt a surge of anger in his fading consciousness when he saw Eyepatch smirking down at him through tightly clamped lips.  He almost didn't notice the shimmering emerald light beaming from behind the eyepatch.

Son of a bitch is trying to suffocate me!  If I let go now, he'll have the upper hand again!  I've got to get him to undo this...

Evan's could barely see through his own veins throbbing in his eyes. With agonizing slowness, he reached his arm upwards.  Eyepatch's eye widened as he realized what Evan was doing.

See you hold your breath through this, you scrawny sack of--

Evan clenched his fist around Eyepatch's crotch and twisted.  

Evan would later swear he saw the man's eyes bulge so much that his eyepatch nearly popped off his face. For a moment his cheeks puffed out comically, then the world snapped back to normal as he exhaled in an explosive wheeze.  Evan gasped and coughed as the air found traction in his lungs once again, but he did not let up.  He let go of Eyepatch's groin, raised his hand, and brought his fist down in a hammer blow on the man's abdomen.  There wasn't much air in his body to expel, but what did come out was accompanied by streamers of thick, phlegmy drool.  Still gasping, Evan pushed himself to his knees and crawled up his enemy's body, straddling his hips and grabbing both his wrists.  As the other man struggled weakly while fighting for breath, Evan set his jaw and concentrated.

Reach out with the idea of your arm...

When Evan had shut down the pain monster's powers, he had gotten the impression of shoving his arm into a pitch-black barrel of angry, leprous eels.   It had been disgusting and painful and extremely unpleasant, but it felt like it was supposed to feel like that.  It made sense for a monster.  

This was something altogether different, and somehow at the same time less awful and much, much scarier.

Evan didn't see or hear or otherwise actually perceive anything different with his normal senses, but the instant his 'cords' made contact with the other man's, he got the impression that he was inside a massive machine.  The feeling was claustrophobic and kenophobic at the same time: Evan could sense an impossible density of gears whirring and grinding and clacking, pressed around him without even a nanometer of space between them, but at the same time, the space felt so immense and empty and unknowable.  He couldn't tell where the walls were.  He couldn't tell if there was a floor.

Evan felt himself start to lose it.  The paradoxical combination of fears was pulling at his psyche in ways he'd never even thought possible.  But Eyepatch was still struggling beneath him and glaring at him, and if he stopped time again, or even just got his breath back, there would be trouble.   Evan gritted his teeth and thrust his imagined arm into the maybe-existent gears.

Evan felt a recoil like the sound of a fuse blowing and both he and Eyepatch froze.  Evan knew he'd done it.  He grinned.

“Alright!  Now, why don't we--”

Eyepatch's right hand shrunk and slipped out of Evan's grip, then contorted into a narrow point and plunged into Evan's left eye.  

Evan screamed as the left half of his face exploded in agony and half his vision vanished.  The pain hit without any of the buffers he'd thought he 'd gained from the pain demon and he involuntarily let go of Eyepatch's other wrist as he grabbed for his face.  This turned out to save his other eye, as Eyepatch lashed his left arm like a whip at Evan's face.  As it was, the impact of the blow was enough to knock Evan off-balance and he toppled to the floor as Eyepatch bucked his hips.  The smaller man thrashed his body again and was suddenly on his feet, ripping the eyepatch off his right eye.

“What did you do to me, you motherfucker?  What the hell did you do?”

Through his remaining watering eye, Evan saw that Eyepatch’s now-unpatched eye was surrounded by a spiderweb of fine scars, like cracks spreading out from the epicenter of a broken window.  Eyepatch blinked the eye hard a couple of times, then rubbed it, blinked again, and then glared at Evan again.  Evan saw his head jerk towards his gun, which lay on the carpet a couple of feet from Evan’s left.  Evan thought he saw him tense to pounce, so he rather impotently kicked at him with his right leg.  

That turned out to be a mistake.  Moving with a furious grace that didn’t match his scruffy appearance, Eyepatch caught Evan’s foot in both hands, then twisted it sideways and lifted it upwards.  Evan dug his hand into the carpet to resist being turned over, but he realized too late that he wasn’t going for some kind of hold or joint lock.  

Hot-cold terror shot through Evan as Eyepatch opened his mouth just a little too wide.  He didn’t have the time to kick with his other leg or the leverage to wrench himself away.

Eyepatch sunk his teeth deep into Evan’s ankle, just above the heel, and ripped away a three-inch chunk of flesh.  Evan screamed as horrible agony raced up his leg and his foot went limp.  

“What the fuck, man? What the fuck!”

His voice was cracking and warbling with pain, but dignity was the last thing on his mind.  

Why does it hurt so much now?  Why am I not healing?!

As if on cue, a disgruntled, hollow gurgling sound resonated from his guts.  He was suddenly aware of how long it’d been since he’d last eaten. After the frustration with the AC and the Guiding Light, he’d gone straight to bed without dinner…

“Oh, you gotta be fucking kiddi—augh, what the fuck?”  

Eyepatch had spat Evan’s own Achilles’ tendon into his face.  Combined with the fluid from his seeping, ruined eye, Evan’s face was now completely slick with his own gore.  But through the blood and tears, Evan could see Eyepatch opening his mouth freakishly far again to take another bite—this time behind the knee.  

“Oh no you don’t!”  

Evan swung his left leg up and cracked Eyepatch in the back of the head with his heel, then squeezed him between his legs as best he could.  Even before he’d bulked up, Evan had thighs that could crush a watermelon, but Eyepatch somehow managed to go limp and slide out from between Evan’s legs, winding up on top of him.

As Evan raised his hands to stop Eyepatch’s renewed attempts to relieve him of right eye, Evan realized he was shaking.  It may have been exhaustion or pain, but Evan realized he was also afraid.

It’s like I’m fighting a cat!  He’s some kind of monster!  He just looks human!  What is he?! What else can he do?!

Eyepatch had given up on the gouging and now was punching fiercely at Evan’s head and shoulders while straddling his chest.  He was stronger than he looked, and the punches had a rough sort of finesse to them—quickly in and out, never two to the same spot in a row, a staggered cadence that made it hard to anticipate when the next one would come… his torso was twisting back and forth, whipping his wiry limbs at Evan like a willow tree in a whirlwind.  And his movements were getting faster.  Through the flurry of blows, Evan could see the greenish light beginning to shine from Eyepatch’s right eye again, as if a lightbulb was slowly turning on inside his head and the light was seeping through cracks in his skull.  

Shit!  His power’s coming back already!  Time’s slowing down for him!

Eyepatch’s outline began to blur as the punches increased in speed.  They were beginning to scrape Evan’s skin where they landed, like tiny carpet burns.  Evan realized it was now or never.

He’s not a monster!  He’s just a man with special powers, like me!  He must have some kind of abnormal range of joint motion!  He’s just another freak!  I can beat him, but I have to do it now!

It was time for a sacrifice play.  Evan dropped his guard and thrust his left hand up into Eyepatch’s face, wrapping his fingers around his face like he was palming a basketball.  Eyepatch twisted his head, opening his mouth to pull Evan’s ring and little fingers between his teeth.  

Evan felt his face twist into a grin.  You can have them!

Before Eyepatch could bite down, Evan yanked his arm off to the side, pulling Eyepatch off-balance. Then he planted his left heel on the floor for leverage and twisted his whole body.

Different fighting styles have different opinions on where the strength of a punch really comes from, but many martial arts depend on rotational force generated by the twisting of the midsection and hips to generate the force of the blow. Normally, it would be very difficult to utilize this sort of motion from a prone position, but Evan was far from normal.

The practice of multiple forms of dancing throughout his life had taught him to manipulate his abdominal and oblique muscles with an unusual degree of strength and control. And now, those muscles were huge.

So when Evan swung his right fist into Eyepatch’s ribs, it was not a desperate ‘get off me’ punch; it was akin to a heavyweight’s knockout hook.

Eyepatch seized up for a moment as the blow rocked him.  His teeth were halfway through Evan’s fingers, but that worked in Evan’s favor. Since Eyepatch couldn’t easily slip free, Evan was able to half-fling/half-drag him off his chest. Then, using the smaller man as leverage, Evan pushed himself up on his good leg.

Eyepatch was also trying to stand, but Evan’s weight on his head was forcing into a sort of hunch. He was still trying to bite through Evan’s fingers.  Evan gritted his teeth and yanked his left hand back.  

The sensation of his fingers being torn off was traumatic, but Evan was already executing his next move. As Eyepatch straightened up from the sudden removal of weight, Evan pushed off with his left foot and threw his right fist forward, using the momentum of his fall to punch Eyepatch square in the stomach.  

It was as a clumsy blow, but neither man was steady on his feet.  Eyepatch was thrown back against the dresser, his breath forced out of him. Evan toppled after him, but with only one functioning foot, he couldn’t keep his balance well enough to maneuver strategically.  He slammed into Eyepatch, smashing him against the dresser again, but their bodies separated as Evan bounced back from the recoil.  Evan frantically flailed at Eyepatch as he started to fall forward again, but the smaller man was out of his reach.  Then, as Evan began to fall forward for real, Eyepatch blurred into near invisibility for a split second just before Evan landed on him.  

Something hard and blunt stabbed painfully into Evan’s chest, right on his left nipple.  Gasping in pain, Evan looked down and saw his own huge revolver, the barrel pressed so hard into his skin that blood was leaking onto the barrel.  Eyepatch’s right eye was closed again, his scars glowing faintly as he fixed Evan with a furious glare from his other eye.  For a moment, both men simply breathed, slow and hard, staring at each other, frozen in an uncomfortable, gory tableau.  

Evan finally spoke. “Go ahead,” he said, breathing heavily through his nose, “it won’t do you any good.”

Evan idly spun a small tumbler of dark brown liquid in his palm as he stood shirtless in front of the mirror.  As the ice clinked against the glass, he ran the fingers of his empty hand across his new scar.  It was surprisingly round, slightly to the right of center and two inches above his navel. The edges were very slightly raised, which felt weird, but at least it hadn’t torn out his belly-button piercing.  He wasn’t sure of the logistics of getting that re-pierced with super-fast healing. He turned his back to the mirror and peered over his shoulder.

“How the hell is the exit wound triangular when the entry wound is round?” he muttered to himself, taking a drink as he left the bathroom.  He climbed up into his bed-loft and stretched out on the mattress, staring at the ceiling without really looking at it.

Do I want to know? Should I know? If I try to figure this out, do I run the risk of learning whatever it was I went to such lengths to forget?

He tipped back the rest of the bourbon and set the glass down on the nightstand.  He reached into the drawer and pulled out a handful of small cell phones, shuffling through them like a man might sift through takeout menus.  Eventually he settled on one and entered a number by muscle memory trained over more than two decades.

“Hi, Mom.  It’s me.  No, everything’s fine.  It’s okay, all my calls are being bounced from a proxy sat–it’s fine.  I’m in the southwest.  Yeah, it’s dry here.  It’s been pretty quiet.  I’ve been working out a lot—you probably wouldn’t recognize me!”

Evan winced at the unintended implications of that statement.  He was suddenly very aware of his own face and the question of how he was going to explain it to his family.  He felt his jaw clench.

“What? Sorry, zoned out there a second.  Oh yeah, I called because I had a question: what was the name of that family whose ranch we visited when I was nine? Yeah, the one where—yeah.  No, it doesn’t hurt any more.  Brighton?  And what was the name of the boy who… Clifford?  Cliff.  They still send us Christmas cards? Really? Hey, could you email me one of those? It’s weird, but I swear I saw Cliff somewhere a few weeks ago and I just figured out where I knew him from. Yeah, small world!”

A few moments of small talk followed.  “Okay, Mom, I’ll try to call more often.  I know. Send me that picture, would you? Love you too.  Say hi to Dad for me.  Bye!”

The email arrived half an hour later.  Evan pulled it up on his ‘real’ phone and smiled.  It was a very charming picture.  At its center was a huge mustachioed man, seated in an equally huge leather armchair in front of a cheery stone fireplace hung with numerous stockings. He was surrounded by family: a short, rosy-cheeked wife and several children of varying sizes.  Standing just behind him, with his proudly-puffed-out chest straining his green and red sweater and his hair tamed with what must have been at least three handfuls of mousse, stood the man from Evan’s vision. There was no doubt in his mind.

Aw, hell, Evan thought, feeling his cheeks burn, he sure grew up cute.

 ————–

The next day didn’t prove as fruitful as the conversation with his mother had.  Following the advice of the nice young… orc (it still felt strange to even think that) at the gas station, he’d travelled to Albuquerque in search of a pawn shop that might have some legitimate magical objects, or at least some leads on them.  Unfortunately, he didn’t have many details to go on, and was forced to go from shop to shop.   He found the stucco city and the sweeping desert charming, but a full day of digging through somebody’s dead aunt’s silver and other bric-a-brac while trying to drop inquires that didn’t make him sound like a lunatic, Evan was ready to give up.  But one last shop remained on his circuit of stops for the day, so he found himself meekly entering Delman’s Jewelry & Pawn half an hour before their posted closing time.  A perpetually-sunburned looking man in his early seventies—Mr. Delman, Evan presumed–watched him with a mixture of suspicion and annoyance as he walked towards the counter.

“Hey, uh, sorry to come in so close to closing time,” Evan said sheepishly, hoping that his makeup was still covering most of his questionably-survivable scars.  The old man gave him a tired glare from behind quarter-inch-thick glasses.  “I won’t be long,” Evan continued, feeling himself sweating even more than he had in the desert heat.  “Do you have an, uh, antiques section?”

The old man cocked a fuzzy gray eyebrow and jerkily gestured further into the store.  “Towards the back.  Anything that ain’t junk is in the main cases, though.”

“Thanks, I’ll have a quick look and be out of your hair in… no time,” Evan said, wincing when he realized the man was almost completely bald.  A nicotine-stained scowl told him that he had damn well better make it quick.

Evan fished in his pockets for his notes as he walked down the aisles of the shop.  Past him had been meticulous in his chronicling his knowledge of the supernatural, but whether or not he’d been right was of significant concern to his current self.  Plus, there must have been some context missing—some mental highway that he hadn’t counted on getting demolished.  

Look for very old ornate silver with more circular writing… modern work tends to be more jagged and on incomplete/scrap pieces of metal or ceramics… if it looks like any language you recognize it’s probably fake…don’t be fooled by Nordic runes, that’s just writing…

There!

Something caught his eye. A strange, looping symbol, barely visible on dull silver peeking out from between pewter and brass.  Him even seeing it was sheer luck, let alone recognizing it for what it was.  He gently pushed the intervening candlesticks and cutlery aside and picked the thing up.

It was an old-fashioned oil lamp, its glass missing and its wick lost to either time or use.  It barely filled the palm of his hand and couldn’t have weighed more than a pound.  Evan raised it to his eyes, then consulted the bundle of notes in his hand. Placing the lamp back the shelf, he began flipping through pages of hand-drawn symbols until familiarity sparked.

It was a spiraled, curling thing, almost imperceptibly crossed with short lines.  Underneath it, he’d written: to seek, to look, to find, to discover?

He looked back at the lamp. He was almost certain that was one of the symbols etched onto its dull surface.  He could barely make the others out, and so took the lamp into his hand again. He fished in his pocket for his handkerchief and raised it to the silver.  

Then he froze.

Very slowly and deliberately, he placed the lamp back on the shelf, pulled out a notebook, and wrote Are genies real?, underlining it several times.

Movement caught the corner of his eye.  Someone small had darted past the end of the aisle and was scurrying towards the back of the store.  He could hear their shoes scuffling rapidly, and he could almost picture the person furtively looking around.   The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

The footsteps started in his direction again.  Evan quickly ducked behind the end of the shelf, hoping it would obscure his newfound bulk.  The small figure went by again in a blur of black and… pink?  He heard them slide to a stop, and there was a hurried whispered exchange of breathless voices.  Then a very distinct metallic click.  Evan felt his stomach drop.

Now there was a muffled commotion coming from the front of the store.  He could hear Mr. Delman’s voice—he couldn’t make out the words yet, but the pawnbroker sounded tense.  Evan crouched down and moved as quickly as he could towards the front of the store.

He stopped behind a rack of faded camouflage coveralls and peered towards the counter.  Delman was standing with his hands raised to shoulder height almost lazily, his expression partly worried but mostly  annoyed.  Across the counter from him was the figure he’d seen earlier, a small person in a huge winter coat and a pink ski mask, standing next to a similar figure in a black ski mask.  Black mask was holding a small pistol tightly in both hands at absolute arms’ length, the weapon shaking as they made stammered, hushed demands of an increasingly unimpressed Delman.

Shit.

I should do something. Is it really my business?  It’s not going be all immortal assassins and pain monsters.  It’s the things that impact lives that make a hero.  The little things.

Alright.  Get their attention, but don’t startle them.

Evan straightened up and stepped around the clothes rack, letting his hip bump against it as he did so. It rocked slightly, then tipped back in the other direction, making a quiet clatter as the hangers slid into each other and the feet touched down.

Delman was growling something at the black-hooded gunman and neither of them seemed to notice, but the pink-hatted robber jerked their head towards him and looked him right in the eye. Their eyes widened and Evan felt his lips curl into a snarl.  Pink hat frantically slapped at black hat’s shoulder, seemingly struck dumb by Evan’s appearance.

“What?  What?!”

Pink shrieked wordlessly and pointed in Evan’s direction.  Black’s eyes widened under his mask and he began to turn towards Evan, swinging the gun around.  Delman took the opportunity to drop behind the counter.

Perfect!

Evan summoned up his deepest, most menacing voice.

“What the HELL do you think you’re–“

Crack!

The gunshot was puny by gunshot standards, but it still echoed around the shop and rattled the dusty glass and china.  Evan heard the bullet whiz over his head and lodge itself in the wall behind him.  His body seized up for a second.

Oh holy fuck he’s shooting at me!  He’s actually shooting—

KEEP MOVING.

Evan surged forward, as close to a run as a menacing stomp could be.  Black’s hands were shaking so violently now that the next bullet punched into the floor near his own feet.  Pink screamed again, ducking behind Black.  

“DROP THE DAMN GUN!” Evan roared.  He was less than three yards from the pair now.

Crackcrackcrack!

Three hammer-blows struck Evan in the gut.  He doubled over, gasping… except he didn’t.  The pain was there, but the reflexes that normally accompanied an injury—those instincts to grab for the wound, to run from the source of the pain—were completely absent.  His body knew it had been attacked, but it somehow didn’t interpret it as anything to get too worked up about.  In fact, he could already feel the bullets being pushed out of his belly by his rapid healing.  He stopped for a moment, looking on as the three flattened stubs of lead clattered to the floor, then looked up with his face twisted into a snarl of fury.

He could actually hear Black wet himself.  

Evan rushed forward, swinging his arm in a huge arc.  His initial intent had been to knock the gun away, but the swing caught Black hard in the chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him back into Pink.  Both would-be robbers hit the wall and fell in a scrambling, blubbering heap.

Evan turned to the sound of a shotgun cocking.  “Thanks for the assist, kid,” Delman said, a mean twinkle in his eye. “I’ll take it from here.”

 ———

Evan flipped the “OPEN” sign to “CLOSED" and switched off the lights as Mr. Delman had instructed.  His shoulders sagged and he sighed heavily.  Even through the closed office door, he could hear Delman’s outraged voice. When they had forced the foiled robbers into the office and pulled off the masks, they had been met with a boy and a girl whose combined ages wouldn’t have added up to Evan’s.  Delman’s face had gone strangely blank, and he’d asked Evan if he could close up the storefront for him.  As soon as the door closed behind him, the yelling had started. Now he stood a couple feet away from the door, awkwardly shifting his weight as he wondered if he should go back in.

Perhaps to delay that decision for a few moments, Evan picked up the boy’s revolver from where he’d placed it after Delman had herded the kids out of the room.  It was a cheap, flimsy-feeling thing, a typical .22 caliber Saturday Night Special.  Evan swung the chamber open and dumped the casings and unspent cartridge into his palm. Not exactly powerful bullets, but…

He reached under his shirt and felt his stomach.  There were no scars, no bruises.  Hell, he wasn’t even sore.  But the holes in his shirt were proof enough that he’d taken three bullets at point-blank range and hadn’t even had the wind knocked out of him.  It wasn’t that he hadn’t felt them hit him—it had hurt, but… it just didn’t matter.  It was like his body instinctively knew that, given his freakish healing capabilities, the shots didn’t actually pose a threat to him.  He looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, absently clenching and un-clenching his fist.

I pulled something out of that pain monster, he thought.  I took something from it.  Can I take powers from other things?  Is that what the ritual did?

His train of thought was broken by more yelling, but it wasn’t Delman this time.  It was the kid with the black hat.  “What the hell was we supposed to do?!” It sounded like he was crying.  

Evan turned the knob and cracked the door open.  “Store’s, uh, closed up, sir,” he said, poking his head into the office. “Doesn’t look like anyone heard the shots.  Or, at least, nobody called the cops.”

“Thanks, kid,” Delman said, sounding more tired and sad than angry or anxious.  “Look, maybe come back tomorrow and see if you can find what you were looking for, I–“

“You know them,” Evan said. It wasn’t a question, because he didn’t need to ask.  The shotgun was nowhere to be seen and the kids were sitting on folding chairs, unrestrained.  The boy staring at his lap, his face quivering as he fought back tears.  The girl—his sister, Evan assumed from the resemblance—was fixing him with a look of angry defiance that only a pre-teen could muster.

Delman sighed and threw up his hands.  “I sponsor their friggin’ little league teams!  Of course I know ‘em,” he muttered.  “Samson and Raquel Nelson.  Their momma died late last year.  Pancreatic cancer.  They got an older brother who’s been lookin’ after ‘em, but he’s fallen in with a bad crowd lately–”

“Ain’t like he had a choice!” Samson spluttered, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Landlord’s been jackin’ up rent every month and charging us for every bullshit–“

“Samson Quincy Nelson, if I hear you use that kinda language again I will show you the back of my hand so hard you’ll see it when you close your eyes, do you understand me?”

Samson burst into tears. Delman went red in the face and ran his hand across his scalp, mumbling to himself.  Evan held his arm out between them, looking Delman in the eye with a resolute expression on his face.  Delman seemed to understand his intention and, after a sigh and shrug, he made a “be my guest” gesture towards the kids.

Evan stepped forward and crouched down putting him at roughly eye level with the adolescents. “Hey, guys, it sounds like…”

Ptu.

Evan had to hand it to the girl; she could spit with surprising accuracy.  The sudden shock of a ball of saliva and phlegm in his eye made Evan overbalance and topple gracelessly back onto his ass.  Delman erupted again as Evan wiped his eye.  Raquel screamed back, and the room filled with the cacophonous voices of a crotchety old man and a preteen girl with nothing to lose.  Once his eye was clear, Evan looked back up and saw Samson staring at him.  He met the boy’s eyes which were brimming with tears, but also seemed to have the light of realization dawning in them.

“How come you ain’t dead?” he asked quietly.  Delman and Raquel both stopped mid-scream, looked at the boy, then looked at Evan. “I know I shot you.  I shot you ‘least three times.”

Evan pushed himself up again, getting back to his feet.  His fingers absently toyed with the holes in his shirt.  “Well,” he said after a moment, “the reason I’m not dead is…”

He faltered.  He didn’t really know himself.  He knew he healed fast but he didn’t know why. Should he explain that?  

No.  The three faces watching him, wrought with worry, pain, and fear, told him the answer.  He straightened up and put his hands on his hips, tilting his chin up and smiling what he hoped was an inspiring smile.

“The reason I’m not dead is because I’m a superhero.”

"That’s bullshit,” Raquel muttered.  "Ain’t no such thing as superheroes.“

Evan held up a hand to cut off Delman’s incoming tirade about profanity.  "Then why am I not dead?”

“I don’t know, you must be wearing armor or–”

Evan lifted up his shirt slightly, patting his bare stomach.  "All beef.  Try again.“

"You flexed really hard right when they hit, then.”

Evan laughed. “Even if that were right–and possible–how could I get the timing right?”

Raquel looked away, jaw clenched in defeat.  "…if you were a superhero.“

Evan beamed. "Exactly!  And what do superheroes do?”

“…fight bad guys? Save people?”

“Right!  And it sounds like you guys need help.  So tell me how I can help you.”

So they told him, with Delman filling in some of the blanks.  About how their older brother, Jamal, had dropped out of college to take care of his younger siblings after their mother had gotten sick.  About how he’d been working a factory job to provide for them.  About how the bills for their mother’s medical and funerary expenses had been too much.  About how he’d started selling meth for a gang called the Five-Tens to make ends meet. About how he’d had to dump ten grand worth of product to avoid getting caught by the cops.  About how the gang had broken both his pinky fingers–the titular five and ten from their name–to teach him a lesson.  About how they told him if he didn’t pay for the missing product in two weeks, they’d do worse.  About how that was twelve days ago.  About how they knew that Mr.Delman had a lot of cash on hand.  About where Jamal kept his gun.

About how the gang hid out in an incomplete housing development in a sparsely-populated suburb.

By the time the story was done, Evan had made his decision.  "Mr. Delman, how much cash do you have in the shop?“

"Why the hell are you asking that?”

Evan reached into his jacket and Delman looked like he was about to go for the shotgun again before Evan pulled his wallet from an inner pocket.  "Because I’m going to need to make a purchase with a lot of cash back,“ he said, handing Delman a solid black card.  He turned to the kids.  "Go home.  Get your brother and pack up everything you’ll need for a couple weeks.  I’ll be sending some people along to get you somewhere safe for a while.”

A few minutes later, the would-be robbers had left, still somewhat bewildered.  Delman was packing stacks of bills into an attache case while Evan made a few phone calls.  After they were both done, Delman handed the case to Evan.  "What the hell are you going to do, exactly?“

"What a superhero does.”

——-

It was nearly midnight, and a heavyset man was making his way up the street through a small village’s worth of incomplete houses.  His panting, stumbling gait was bringing him towards a house that was still half-covered by tarps and scaffolding, like most of its neighbors.  This particular house was unique in the pitch-dark development, however, due to the light leaking from the cracks and creases in its incomplete walls.  The man stopped at the end of its driveway and stood bent double for nearly two minutes; after catching at least some of his breath, he made his way up the driveway, muttering and panting and wiping his forehead.  When he reached the front door, he stopped for breath again, then straightened up and ran a hand through the sparse strands of hair left on his head. Then he knocked.

He could hear surprised and irritated voices behind the door for a few moments.  He leaned forward and examined himself in the reflexion in the door’s peephole.  Sunburned, pockmarked complexion; wide, bulbous nose; jowly jawline seamlessly flowing into a flabby neck.  He grinned, his surprisingly perfect teeth the only mismatch in his otherwise sloppy appearance.  

The light in the peephole vanished.  "The fuck’re you?“

The man held up the silver case handcuffed to his wrist.  "Lorenzo the Bagman.  I gots a delivery for who'ver’s in charge here.”  

“Open the case,” the voice behind the door responded after a moment.

Lorenzo fiddled with the case’s lock for a moment, then cracked it open an inch and held it up. Green bills shone in the faint light. “Good enough?”

Another moment of silence. The door opened a crack and the barrel of a gun peeked out.  "Slowly. Hands where we can see ‘em.“

Lorenzo squeezed his considerable bulk through the door, feeling the barrel of the shoddy SMG poking into his back.  The voice that had been giving him instructions seemed to belong to the kid behind him–probably barely out of high school (if that), but hard-edged and mean-looking.  "Frisk 'im,” he said to his companion, an equally sketchy-looking young man armed with an equally crappy-looking gun.  

“Why do I gotta frisk his fat ass?”

“'cuz I’m the one keepin’ the gun on him, ain’t I?”

“Christ, what is this, amateur hour?” Lorenzo interjected, sneering, “if I was here to wreck the place, you think I’d be stupid enough to do with a buncha money cuffed to me? Fuck’s sake,” he spat, and grinned inwardly as the two punks looked away in embarrassment.  “Just take me to yer leader so I can get outta this dump. Jesus Mary n’ Joseph, back in my day, a hideout meant something.”

The two young men met each other’s gaze as Lorenzo continued to mutter about declining standards in organized crime.  The one behind Lorenzo spoke first.  

“Let’s take him to VizzyJ.”

“The hell kinda name is 'VizzyJ’?” Lorenzo asked incredulously as he was prodded forward.

“Stands for 'Visceral Jay’.”

“Okay, not bad, but what’s the J stand for?”

“I just told you–'Jay’.”

“Yeah, but what’s it stand for?”

“Christ, don’ you ever shut up, old man?”

They continued to bicker as Lorenzo was lead through the half-finished house and up the stairs. They passed rooms outfitted with mishmashes of furniture, equipped for various criminal enterprises or simply squatter-grade habitation.  Lorenzo spotted mattresses, worn armchairs, a jury-rigged marijuana grow room, piles of miscellaneous loot, and, inexplicably, a large cage holding what appeared at a glance to be a sizable feral hog.  As they passed, other occupants of the building called out and a few even fell in behind the three; by the time they had reached the the third floor, with Lorenzo panting and muttering all the way, they had acquired a procession of half a dozen curious gangsters.

One of the original escorts rapped on a door–one of the few doorways in the house that had an actual door in it–and slipped through a few moments later.  Lorenzo could overhear him talking to someone whose voice was so deep it was only audible as a deep rumble through the door.  The goon stuck his head back through the door.

“Bring 'im in.”

Lorenzo was pushed through the door into an actual finished room–probably originally intended to be the master bedroom of the house.  The floor under his feet was plushly carpeted, moonlight shone through a skylight in the sloped ceiling, tasteful paintings of exotic landscapes and foliage adorned the walls, and an ornamental fountain in the shape of a koi bubbled tranquilly away in the corner.  The centerpiece of the room was a large mahogany desk holding a huge leather-bound ledger in which a man of equally prodigous size was writing with a gold-filagreed pen.  Lorenzo gave a low whistle.

“Now, see?  This is what I’m talking about!” he said emphatically, pointing at the men he’d been chastising earlier, “this is how it’s done!  Tasteful, but modern.  This guy knows how it’s done.”

The man behind the desk chuckled, not looking up from the ledger.  "I’m glad you approve.  Too many people these days don’t appreciate subtlety,“ he said, finishing a line and very deliberately putting the cap back on the pen.  He stood up, brushing the creases out of his black-and-red pinstripe jacket.  He finally looked Lorenzo in the eye, and the bagman could see in his sharp, dark eyes the gleam of barely-restrained hunger.  A look of pure ambition.  

”'Lorenzo the Bagman’, huh,“ Visceral Jay said, stepping out from behind the desk. "I like that.  You don’t hear that word very often any more.  It’s old school,” he said, looking Lorenzo up and down.  

Lorenzo did the same. Visceral Jay was a huge man, at least six-foot-four, with close-cropped hair and a matching beard, creating the illusion of his entire head being permanently wreathed in shadows.  His suit was clearly tailored to his considerable size, which Lorenzo could tell was not just for show–his fingers were partially obscured by several sizable rings, but a clear smattering of pale scar tissue stood out on his knuckles against his dark skin.  He carried himself with an air of quiet menace, like a man who knows he has nothing to prove because he knows his own strength.

“My boys tell me you’ve got something for me, Mr. Lorenzo,” Jay said after a moment.  

“Right,” Lorenzo said, holding up the case.  He glanced towards the desk.  "You mind?“

"Be my guest.”

Lorenzo set the case down and opened it.  "This is to settle, uh…“ he looked down at something written on the back of his hand.  "Jamal Nelson’s account.  Ten grand for lost merchandise, plus two grand for your trouble.”

Jay picked up a bundle of bills and thumbed through it.  "Very good.  Where’d the money come from?“

"Not my job to ask. I just deliver.  You know how it is.”

Jay chuckled again, setting the bills back down.  "Didn’t have the spine to show up on his own, huh?“

"Sounds like you kinda put the fear of God in him.  'sall the same to me.  If everyone had balls I wouldn’t have a job.  Either way, you get your money.  Can I tell 'im you’re square?”

Jay walked back around his desk and sat down, staring into space over steepled fingers for a long moment.

“…no.”

Lorenzo stiffened. “Come again?”

“Mr. Nelson still owes me for the opportunities I afforded him.  And I cannot abide his use of a washed-up proxy to avoid looking me in the eye.  Respect is everything in this world.  I’m sure a man of your obvious tenure can appreciate that.”

Lorenzo narrowed his beady eyes.  "You don’t want to do this,“ he said, softly.  

"You’re right, I don’t,” Jay agreed, nodding with pursed lips.  "Vikkers, Gerome–take Mr. Lorenzo downstairs and dispose of him.“

Lorenzo snapped the case closed as his original hosts grabbed his arms.  "You kill me, you don’t get the combination to the lock.”

“Oh, we’ll have plenty of time to work that out once we’ve sawn your wrist off,” Jay said, with a hint of a smirk.

“You fuck with it and the dye packs go off!”

“Again, we can afford to be careful.  This concludes our business, bagman.  Get it done,” Jay said to his men.

“Yo J, can we use the Executive?” one of Lorenzo’s captors asked, his voice brimming with almost childlike excitement.

Jay rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he sighed, reaching into his desk drawer.  He laid a huge handgun on the desk.  Its barrel was engraved with subtle vine-like etching and its grip was set with pearl plates. Despite himself, Lorenzo whistled.

“Now that’s classy.  None of that gold-plated shit.  Real businesslike.”

“I appreciate your evaluation of my taste, Mr. Lorenzo,” Jay said, irritation beginning to creep into his voice.  "Get rid of this jackass!“

——–

"Oh my fucking God, again?”

A man in a clearly secondhand hazmat suit groaned as Lorenzo was forced down the stairs into the house’s basement.  

“Nobody asked you, geek,” one of the gangsters sneered.

“Well, maybe they fucking should have!  The last time you guys killed someone down here, the bullet went through him and broke half my glass!  You’re lucky you didn’t burn the damn house down!”

Lorenzo crinkled his nose against the chemical reek.  The basement was full of tables covered in complicated arrays of beakers, flasks, and tubes.  Numerous buckets with very important-looking warning labels were stacked along the walls. A handful of other people in similar garb to the complaining man were bustling about, measuring, pouring, mixing, bagging.  

Lorenzo sneered. “You cook in your damn hideout? Are you all fucking stupid?  Like I said–fuckin’ amatuer hour.”

The chemist threw up his hands.  "Don’t look at me, pal.  We’re all basically independent contractors down here.“

"Also: shut up.” The 'Executive’ cracked off the back of Lorenzo’s head, making him stumble forward.  

“Dumbass, don’t hit him with that!  You fuck it up and J’ll feed it to you!”

“God, what’re you, my mother?  You’re just jealous.”

“Oh yeah, that’s it.  And–”

“Will you just fucking shoot me already?”  Lorenzo interrupted.  "This is frickin’ torture.“

”Fine.“

The two stooges shoved Lorenzo through the maze of tables to an alcove in far corner of the basement. It looked to be an unfinished shower–that was about the only explanation for the drain in the floor. The explanation for the reddish-brown stains around it was much more obvious, given the circumstances.

One of the thugs kicked Lorenzo in the back of the leg, causing him to drop to his knees.  He then cocked back the hammer of The Executive and pressed the barrel to the back of Lorenzo’s head, about an inch to the right of his left ear.  

"You don’t want to do this,” Lorenzo repeated, his voice strangely calm.

“I’m pretty su–” BLAM.

Lorenzo toppled forward onto the concrete, his body spasming slightly.  

“Hah, you got too exicted and shot off early!  Lemme guess, that’s never happened to you before?”

“Man, shut the fuck up and get the hacksaw.  Let’s get that case offa him.”

“Fuck you, you do it. You got to do the fun part so you gotta do the work.”

“Fuck you!  That was still–what the hell?”

The gangsters looked back at Lorenzo’s body.  The wound where the bullet entered seemed to have peeled back the skin of his balding head, and several strands of long brown hair had popped out of the hole.  

“What the…”

Lorenzo’s arms tucked under him and he pushed himself back to his knees.  The gunman and his accomplice screamed as the Bagman got to his feet.  Lorenzo slowly turned to face them, the exit wound in his face already closing up and being replaced with brown-red skin as his pale, flabby flesh seemed to slough off his head.

“No way, man, no fuckin’ way!”

“What is this?”

“This,” Evan growled, glaring at the two through his regrowing eye as he pulled latex away from his face, “is why you didn’t want to do that.”

 ———–

 Mr. Delman looked up as a bell signaled the entrance of a customer.

“Well hey, if it isn’t Mr. Superhero!  Sounds like you had a busy night!”

Evan covered his mouth as he yawned.  "Yeah. Didn’t really get a chance to sleep.“

"So the Nelsons called me and said they were on their way out of town.  That your doing?”

“Yeah.  Hired some movers and security to get them up to Colorado.  Slipped them enough cash for a couple months while Jamal’s fingers heal.  Figured that should keep them off the Five-Tens’ radar for a while.”

“Something tells me they ain’t gonna be an issue for a while,” Delman said, turning the computer monitor on the counter to face Evan.  It displayed a headline: FIRE IN HOUSING DEVELOPMENT REVEALS GANG HIDEOUT; POLICE MAKE MULTIPLE ARRESTS.

“I didn’t mean to burn it down,” Evan said, awkwardly scratching the back of his head. “That’s what happens when you run a crappy meth lab out of your basement.”

Delman raised an eyebrow at him.

“…and someone gets thrown into it,” Evan finished sheepishly.  

“It ain’t in the papers, but I heard that despite all them punks gettin’ out alive, each and every one of them had their fingers or wrists broken,” Delman said, conversationally.  "Wonder why.“

”'cuz it’s hard to fire a gun when you can’t even wipe your own ass,“ Evan said, bluntly. "Otherwise they might try to hunt down the Nelsons.”

Delman slapped his palms on the counter, his face reddening.  "How the hell did you manage that, kid?  The cops grabbed over twenty of those shits.  How’d you get out alive?“

"I didn’t exactly come out unscathed,” Evan said, pulling off his sunglasses.  His left eye was surrounded in a many-pointed star of scar tissue.  His eyebrow had been finished off by the exit wound.  "This one’s going to be hard to hide.“

"Shit,” Delman hissed through his teeth.  "Still, if that’s the worst you got…“

"It’s the only one that stuck, thankfully.  Visceral Jay lived up to his name, though.  He damn near gutted me before his knife got stuck in my arm.”  

“I heard he fell out of the third-story window.”

“Now that’s simply not true,” Evan said, “I knocked him against the wall and kicked him until he went through it.”

Delman snorted. “Well… I can’t say I endorse it, but… couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.  So what brought you back here?”

“Oh yeah, be right back.” Evan strode towards the back of the shop, returning with the silver lamp.  “Can you tell me anything about this?”

“I don’t keep tra–“ Delman cut himself off.  A very deliberate silence fell over the shop as he stared down at the lamp with a look of intense concentration.

“Do you know anything about it?” Evan asked quietly.

Delman slowly looked up at Evan, though he seemed to be looking at his scars more than his face as a whole.  Then he locked eyes with Evan and fixed him with a steely, unblinking gaze for an uncomfortable length of time.  After Evan felt his cheeks start to burn and his eyes begin to water, Delman held up a finger and slowly walked into his office.

After a few long moments of the faint sound of metal drawers squeaking and paper rustling, Delman returned. He was holding what seemed to be a homemade book of some sort, mismatched pages held together between two cardboard covers.  He carried it gingerly, as if it were something unsavory, like roadkill.  It fell from fingertips with a flat whap onto the counter.

“One of my part-timers was working the register.  I had a dentist appointment that day,” Delman said, pursing his lips and staring pointedly at the book, “and apparently some man with one eye came in with that thing,” he pointed to the lamp, “and wanted to sell it.  Said he didn’t need it any more.  My clerk tells him he’ll need to get it appraised and everything, but the man says he’ll take whatever he thinks it’s worth.  Apparently the one-eyed guy thought ten bucks was enough, and he left this… book, saying it ‘went with it’, took then ten and left. My clerk just threw the book in my office for me to look at later.  And I did.”

Here Delman paused, pinching the bridge of his nose as if he felt a headache coming on.

“Most of it I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.  Most of it’s written in languages I’ve never seen.  But there’s this picture of the lamp and I recognized the text with it.  It was written in Hebrew, and y'know, I know people in the community and so I took it down to the temple one day to see if anyone can translate it.  Rabbi says he’ll see if he can find time and I leave it at that.  A couple weeks later he shows up here and practically throws the damn thing at me. Looks like all the blood just drained out of him.  Says it’s obscene, unholy.  Unthinkable shit.  It took some doing, but I managed to get him to explain.  

“Apparently, a direct translation of the thing was just gibberish.  Just random sounds, no real words. But when you read it out loud, it phonetically sounds like Spanish.  So he got a friend of his to help him translate that, and…”

Delman paused again. Evan was gripping the countertop so hard that he felt it creak under his fingers.

“It was instructions for working the lamp, but… you don’t want it, kid.  It’s sick.”

“Please, Mr. Delman. You’ve seen what I’m capable of. I’m at the very start of something big. I just need some kind of direction, some kind of hint.  I need to learn more about this whole new world I’ve stumbled in to.  If this will help me, I’ll pay whatever you ask.”

“It ain’t me you gotta worry about payin’, kid!” Delman snapped.  “That thing… you gotta bleed for it.  Literally.”

Evan actually chuckled with relief.  “That’s all? I’ve got blood to spare!”

“Yeah, well, be that as it may, that ain’t all it takes.  I’m sure you noticed it ain’t got a wick.  You gotta make your own.”  Delman pressed his knuckles into the countertop, and leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Outta your own skin.”

“How does it burn, then? Do you have to dry it out or something?”

“The hell is wrong with you? That’s what you’re focusing on here?”

“I had a .45 caliber bullet blow my eye out from the inside five hours ago and I can see out of it just fine,” Evan said, looking down at his arms and turning them over as though appraising them.   “My flesh seems to be something of a renewable resource.”  

“I ain’t even gonna ask about that, not worth knowin’,” Delman said, half-heartedly throwing up his hands.  “Fine. You want it, it’s yours.”

“What does it do?”

Delman puffed out his cheeks and slowly exhaled the air, running his hand along his scalp. "It’s called the Guiding Light. If you write down something you’re looking for–in more of your own blood–on the wick–again, out of your own skin, can’t stress that enough–and light it, the flame’ll point you in its direction of its best interpretation of what you wrote.  But this magic shit has a mind of its own, so God knows what that’ll be, plus you gotta write the what it down in these symbols,” he added, slapping the book with the back of his hand, “so accuracy might be something of an issue.”

Evan inhaled deeply and grinned.  "It’s perfect.“

Delman groaned, but began to wrap up the lamp in packing paper regardless.  Once he handed the items to Evan in a bag, he spoke again. "I gotta ask, kid–who are you?”

Evan thought back to the night before, when a beaten and bloody Visceral Jay had asked the same question, his panicked face lit by the flames that were rapidly engulfing the building.

“I’m the necessary evil.”

Punch.

“I’m what’s coming to you.”

Kick.

“I’m the bad thing that happens to bad people!”

Smash.

“I’M…”

It began with a man. A significant percentage of stories do. Almost half! This man wasn’t doing much, for someone at the beginning of a story. In fact, he was just sitting on a bench, doing nothing. He was a bit unusual looking, but no more so than anyone else—just distinct enough that his lack of distinctiveness didn’t make him stand out. He was on the shorter side, a bit heavyset, maybe in his late forties. The term ‘swarthy’ had probably been used to describe him more than once. He wore baggy cargo shorts, a sun-faded Hawaiian shirt, a wide-brimmed hat, and large aviator sunglasses. He flicked a toothpick back and forth between his lips, and a gold tooth flashed in his mouth when he smiled. He looked like somebody who had some interesting stories. Associates probably referred to him as a ‘character’.

This man wouldn’t even be of note in this story but for his reaction to an event that he couldn’t have witnessed. He was sitting in front of a cosmetics store without any large windows. He couldn’t see inside, it was busy and noisy in the street, and the shop’s door was being fastidiously kept closed to keep the air conditioning in. So when a boy in the store wandered away from his mother and pulled a shelf over on himself, why did the man start to smile? When the child started to wail as bystanders struggled to free him, why did the man’s lips part in a grin? And why did the child’s screams get more and more frantic and pained even after he was freed, while the man outside chuckled darkly to himself?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, whatever was happening preoccupied the man enough that he didn’t notice another man exit the store and stride up next to him. The man on the bench didn’t look up until the other man cleared his throat.

“What?” he snapped, irritably. “Oh.” The man standing over him was large and broad, his scarred face partially obscured by a hood and large dark sunglasses. The twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun poked almost casually out of his jacket, leveled at the sitting man’s head.

“Let’s take a walk.”

Once deep in the alley and around a corner, Evan shoved the man against the wall, left forearm pressed to his collarbone and shotgun pushing into his gut.

“What were you doing to that kid?” Evan growled, hoping he sounded suitably intimidating. The man just gave him a gold-toothed grin.

“I got no idea whatcher talkin’ about.”

Evan pushed the gun in further. “Don’t bullshit me,” he snarled. “I saw it.”

“Saw what, pal?”

“You were making that kid hurt more than he should have, and you were, I don’t know, feeding off it. I could see the… miasma bleeding off him through the wall, leading right to you!”

The man shrugged. “What're you talking about?” he chuckled, dismissively. “That shelf looked really heavy! It's no wonder he was screamin' his head off!”

“It was aluminum. I pulled it off him with one hand and--"

Evan's brain caught up with his ears. He paused for a moment, then pulled the gun from the man's gut and held it under his chin.

“I didn't say anything about a shelf,” he said, hoping his voice was low and menacing enough, “You couldn't have seen it happen. You couldn't have known.”

The man's face went blank for a moment, then split into a sheepish grin. “Whoops. Guess I overplayed my hand, huh?”

Evan's figure twitched on the trigger. "So you were what, feeding off his pain? What are you, a... sorcerer or something?"

Despite the gun in his face, the man laughed and clapped slowly. "Not bad, not bad! You're half right, kid. I amplified that little boy's pain so it'd be a bit more filling. As for what I am, well..."

Evan spasmed, bending forward slightly. He tried to fire the shotgun, but the man had somehow jammed his fat finger into the trigger guard behind the triggers. He looked down at the source of the strange pain he was beginning to feel.

The man's right arm was no longer an arm. From the bicep down it had swollen and warped and twisted into a nightmarish mass of pulsating exposed muscle and spears of grayish bone, and several of those spears were sticking into Evan's stomach. His blood was already running down the bone.

"Y-you're... some kind of monster..." Evan stammered, feeling blood and bile rise in his throat as the simultaneous sensation of heat and cold began to resonate from his gut.

The man chuckled, his voice now something of a watery gurgle accompanied by a screeching echo of itself. "Kid, saying I'm some kinda monster is like saying you're some kinda animal," he said, effortlessly flicking the shotgun out of Evan's limp hand. "Technically correct, but it really doesn't come close to telling the whole story."

Evan let out a hoarse scream as the man lifted him off the ground with impossible ease. Maybe if he made enough noise, somebody would come...

"Don't bother screamin', now," the man said, holding up his still-normal left hand. A gaudy golden ring, set with a thumbnail-sized ruby, glinted on his ring finger. "Silence charm. Any noise around in a twenty-foot bubble around us stays there. I mean, don't hold back on my account, though!" He finished the sentence with a laugh like a drain clearing.

"Fuck... you!" Gritting his teeth against the agony of his skewered insides, Evan swung his arm back and twisted as best he could, slamming his fist into the man's cheek as hard as he could manage. He didn't twist or recoil on impact, but he did let out a surprised-sounding grunt.

"Hell, I actually felt that," the man said, rubbing his cheek with his remaining hand. "Not bad. You could actually be mistaken for a threat in bad light! Guess I might as well change."

The air around the man seemed to writhe, as if it was trying to get away from him. As Evan struggled, the man's form collapsed in on itself, as though it was disappearing down an invisible tunnel. At the same time, something else was rushing in to fill the space. Evan felt himself being lifted higher as the monster's legs unfolded underneath its body, a dense, rotund form of exposed, writhing sinew, spikes of jagged bone, and steaming, tar-like ichor. A face that resembled a skinned ape's head with four-inch fangs regarded Evan through eyes that were nothing more than globes of sickly yellow light in hollow sockets.

"That's more like it," it said, rolling its head on its shoulders. It didn't seem to have a neck; instead, the exposed muscle across its shoulders simply ferried the skull from side to side. "You know, I don`t get to come to this realm too often, but this time it was waaaaay easier than normal. And I even managed to catch me a dumb-ass amateur monster hunter! You're lucky, kid! Most of you slapdicks never actually get to find a real one!" It paused for a moment, looking down at its arm as if it'd forgotten it had speared Evan moments earlier.

"Well, maybe 'lucky' ain't the right word," it admitted, scratching the side of its head with a hideously curved claw. It leaned in towards Evan's face, the lights contracting as if it was narrowing its eyes. "Come to think of it, it don't look like 'lucky' applies to you very often. You look like you've been through the wringer and back, pal!"

“What can I say,” Evan hissed through gritted teeth, “I've lived a charmed life.”

“Must be,” the creature agreed with a gargling chuckle. “Actually, it looks like this might be my lucky day, instead! The fact that you're still conscious, let alone alive, means I get to use one of my favorite tricks. Oh, happy day!”

“Glad to… hrrnnghh… be of service.”

The creature placed its free hand over the top of Evan's head. “Now how this is gonna work is: I'm gonna run you back through every pain you've ever felt in your life. Every paper cut, every stubbed toe, every… whatever the hell did that to your face… everything. Back-to-back at high speed for me to sample. I call it a ‘pain flight'. You think that's too melodramatic?”

Evan glared at it from under its palm. The creature shrugged.

“Maybe ask before impaling next time, huh? Oh yeah—if you don't pass out before I get all the way back to the pain of bein' born, I'm pretty sure you'll go insane. Either way, you know, you're fucked, which I guess you probably already knew. Anyway, here we go!”

The pain of the impalement hit him again, even though he was still feeling it. The pains bounced off each other, creating a compound agony so profound that Evan vomited from the shock of it. He thought he was seeing double from the pain at first, but… it was like there was an impression of the monster laid over itself, as if replaying the last few moments.

Pain shot up his right arm, a gripping, tightening pain. He saw the flash of the lightning gun.

He felt his knuckles hitting bone and being hit back. He felt the agony of his pallet seal itself, right after he felt himself pull Carmichael's knife out of his face. It was worse than when it went in.

But with each sensation, he was back in that forest for a split section, tangling with the hitman.

He felt his head hit the edge of the counter, saw the ceiling of the RV. Felt the bouncers’ boots, smelled the hot asphalt and cigarette smoke. Saw the face of the striking woman—large, strong nose, intense brown eyes, titillatingly plush lips split in a sneer as the bottle broke on his head. Saw the bar bathroom as he stumbled painfully around and puked in the pisser. That one came with the smell, too, unfortunately.

Then things got strange. Impressions he didn't remember. General aches. Flashes of aches, delirium, mental confusion. Then something he recognized, but didn't remember.

The barn. The chair. The camera. The…

Oh shit thisisgonnabebad

The pain wasn't as bad as the realization of what the melting sensation inside his head meant. He was deleting himself.

BUT THE PAIN REMEMBERS!

The pain was still insane, though. The drill bit was worse, though. He could hear the whine and the sound of his skull crunching. He knew he was screaming in the real world, but he was desperately trying to glean details from the… vision. Impression. Whatever.

But it was gone. Now he was in another state of confusion. His face was constantly burning. For most of it he seemed to be in the passenger's seat of the RV.

Who's driving who's driving SHOW ME WHO'S FUCKING DRIVING

He could hear impressions of words over the demon's cackling and whooping and his own screaming, but all he could pick up was a hint of a drawl. If only he could concentrate…

Burn of alcohol. Sanitized the wound.

An alarming amount of what he'd come to recognize as the pain of his body rapidly healing itself. Kept me alive.

And then his head exploded. The whole left side of his face felt like it was hit with solid fire. The bone didn't break as much as vaporize. It was transcendent agony.

But he saw him.

His own right arm was shoving someone aside. I took the hit he couldn't?

Tall. Broad. Shaggy blond hair. Blue eyes peeking out from uneven bangs. A look of genuine concern, fear for a friend's safety as he fell backwards, weathered leather cowboy hat falling from his head from the shockwave of whatever was turning Evan's skull into a crater.

Evan's heart, already pounding fit to burst, skipped a beat. He didn't know who this man was, but something in him lurched. He must have been so important to me, he thought. Why did I make myself forget?

That vision flicked out of perception into another confusing miasma. He felt things bite him, slash him. He felt what was probably an arrow shoot through his cheek and split his nose. He saw glimpses of horrible things as he struggled to pry them off him.

And he saw the cowboy again.

In between painful blows he saw him, standing beside him, fists raised. He heard him laugh alongside him as the punched, stomped, and shot their way through mobs of barely-human beings, and a few bars full of actual humans. A broken bottle in the thigh. A knife in the ribs.

A square jaw, a wide nose, a kind smile.

Then the cowboy split his ribcage open with an ax. There was something wrong with him then, though…

His muscles and joints tore and reknotted as he forced himself to get stronger as fast as possible…

The cowboy shouted a warning as something behind him tore his back open…

A huge hair-covered beast clawed at his legs as he squeezed his thighs around its neck, strangling it…

And then it was back to things he could remember. Slamming a hand in the car door. Sitting on his nuts. Biting a fork.

“Go… back,” he croaked, throat raw from screaming.

“Huh?” the monster seemed genuinely surprised. “I… what?”

“Gotta… see… who that was…” Evan gurgled, his left hand grasping at the creature's skull-face.

“That ain’t how this works, dipshit!” the monster grunted, leaning away from Evan’s grasping hand. “I can’t just rewind it! And if you’ve forgotten, you’re being tortured to death here!”

The impact of the bullets on the body armor when he ‘died’. More punches, given and received. More incidental, everyday pains, lost in the accelerating storm of agony.

“No, please… not this part… don’t make me go through this part again!” He gasped, ashamed at how pitiful his voice sounded.

The monster laughed. “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about! You all break in the end! Man, I wish I could see what you’re seein’ but I bet it’s gonna taste great!”

Evan bit back tears.

The hard, wet floor. The strong, rough hands. The mocking laughter. The feeling of tearing, pressure, violation…

He realized he was sobbing. The monster was watching him almost thoughtfully, then made a noise that, in a human, might have been the clicking of a tongue in realization.

“That’s what that taste is! Somebody made you their bitch, didn’t they?” It laughed its gurgling laugh again. “That’s how it always is with you tough guys, always making up for some kinda sexual inadequacy or some trauma like that. Downright Freudian, it is. Fuckin’ sad.”

Evan didn’t even have the strength to glare at it. He just hung there, sobbing and choking on his own vomit, blood, and phlegm as more pains flashed by him, almost unheeded.

The kid at the boxing championship with the plated gloves. Backyard wrestling. The thing his sister and her friends had done with the broom handle. His sister breaking his jaw on his sixteenth birthday.

It was definitely speeding up now, and something in Evan stirred him out of his stupor.

You can’t let it end here.

But what could he do? He had no weapons, no real powers, his strength meant nothing against this thing…

Limping along through the woods on a broken leg. Getting shoved down a hill on a hike and breaking the leg. Aching, ambient pain from the surgery that removed the cancer they’d found in lower intestine.

Something about that last one spurred a recollection. Something not quite a memory, not in this state, but…

The enormous weight of the bull’s hoof crushing his sternum. The horn tearing his side apart as he threw the little boy out of harm’s way.

The little boy with shaggy blond hair and deep blue eyes. The little boy whose cowboy hat, so many sizes too big for his little head, was falling away from Evan with a look of fear and worry in his eyes.

Evan felt his heart lurch like an engine backfiring into life. He felt his soul ignite.

“I KNOW WHO THAT WAS! I KNOW WHO HE IS!” he screamed, his eyes alight with a manic intensity.

“Holy sh—” The monster actually jumped slightly. “Will you get back to sobbin’ about getting’ ass-fucked? I’m almost done here, and so are you.”

Evan grabbed at its face with both hands. “Can’t die here. Won’t let you. I know now. I know. I gotta find him…”

“Fuck off!” The monster tightened its grip over Evan’s head, making his skull creak. It was an odd sound, coming from inside his own head.

There’s gotta be something I can do. I can’t lose here. I did this because I had to. Somebody had to. You have to beat him.

As the impressions became skinned knees and scraped elbows, Evan knew he was running out of time.

One last thing…

Those cords, those cables he’d seen when he’d looked through his fingers. Maybe if…

An arm that wasn’t his arm, yet still at the same time could not be anything else, slipped through the thing’s skull, finding a slimy, writhing morass inside that felt like living sickness. It clenched a handful and yanked.

Evan hit the ground with a thud, his breath hissing between his teeth. The hole in his stomach was already closing. And the creature was a man again, standing there in shredded clothes, staring aghast at his own suddenly all-too-human hands.

“Wh-what… what did… how… what are you?!” he stammered.

Evan lined up three responses in his head:

The truth: “I don’t know.”

The intimidating: “All you need to know is I’m the man who’s about to kick your ass.”

The exhilarating: “I’M A FUCKING SUPERHERO!”

What came out was a mumbled “All you need to don’t fucking know is I’m about the superhero.”

The man blinked and stared at him, mouth slightly agape. “Did you have a fucking stroke?”

Evan kicked him hard in the knee, bracing against the wall to push himself upright as the man howled.

Evan spat out a mouthful of something disgusting and raised his fists. “Shut up and die.”

His first punch caught the man right above the eye as he attempted to straighten up. It hurt his hand, but it hurt the man more. It felt good.

Less than a second after the man’s head hit the alley floor, Evan’s hand was tangled in what was left of his thinning hair and yanking him upright again. His knee crushed the man’s nose with hardly any resistance. Dazed, the man started to topple backwards, but Evan whipped his leg around without his foot touching the ground and kicked him in the back of the head, sending him sprawling forward again onto his hands and knees.

“You deserve worse for what you made me go through, you freak,” Evan growled, stepping over the man’s prone, retching form. “But I’m the mother. Fucking. Good. Guy.” He leaned down and wrapped his arms around the man’s substantial waist, clasped his thighs around his head, and then jerked back upright, swinging the man’s considerable girth into the air with relative ease. “Man, being strong fucking rules!”

“What are you doing?! Stop! You can’t do this to me! It’s impossible!”

Evan bounced up and down a couple times, then shouted in an exaggerated Texas accent, “Bah Gawd, King, I think he’s gonna do it!”

“NOOOOOO!”

Evan jumped and tucked his knees under him. The short-lived pain of his knees crashing into the concrete was nothing compared to the crack of the man’s skull hitting first.

For a moment, Evan sat and watched the body. It stopped twitching after a few seconds, which he was grateful for. The noises it was making were too… human. But eventually it gave one final shudder and lay still. And then it began to dissolve.

It was as if the corpse was made of barely-held-together sand, being silently sucked up by an invisible vacuum cleaner. Evan watched, awestruck, then raised his left hand to his face and peered through his fingers.

The body’s purple-black cords were fraying at the ends, their composite threads bleeding off into nothingness. The whole knotted mess was quickly dissolving, but Evan saw something different within the tangled morass. He couldn’t place why, but a chunk of the stuff looked distinct.

Without blinking, he pulled his left hand away from his eye. He’d found that as long as he held his eye open, the ‘aura vision’, or whatever it was, persisted. Carefully, he reached out and stuck his left hand into the mass.

It was like he’d felt before, when he’d somehow reached into the thing’s head—slimy, cold, and filthy. But it also felt pitiful and fleeting. Dying. He reached deeper.

Visualize. It’s not your arm, it’s… the idea of your arm.

His not-fist closed on something sticky and warm.  He pulled back, but before he could even get a look at the thing, it slipped out of his grasp like sand and flowed down his arm, the sensation stopping at his homemade tattoo.  For a moment, BE YOUR OWN HERO lit up bright blue and tingled slightly.  Evan couldn’t help but feel he’d added something to himself.

All that was left of the man were scraps of his clothes and his gaudy ruby ring.  Evan picked up the ring, eventually managed to fit it over his pinky, then yanked it off in disgust.  How tacky.  Still…

“You sure about this, honey?” the hairdresser asked, casting a skeptical eye over Evan's hair. “That blond looks great with your skin. Very exotic, you know. You could just let it grow out.”

Evan chuckled. “Yeah, I know. Thanks, but I'm trying to keep a low profile. Exotic is kind of the opposite of what I'm going for right now.”

“Alright, you're the boss, big guy,” the hairdresser conceded, barely attempting to hide the disappointment in his voice.

Evan rolled his eyes and then closed them, settling back into the chair as the hairdresser began his work. The combs and fingers and the cool smoothness of the dye in his hair had nearly lulled Evan to sleep before a ringing telephone shocked him awake.

“Oh shoot, honey, I'm sorry, I've got to get that. Be right back!”

“No probl--" Evan started, but he was already halfway across the room. Evan hid a yawn behind an open hand, then casually looked around. A blur of noise and motion caught his eye from the front of the salon—a small boy, mostly likely the son of one of the salon's other patrons, was throwing himself back and forth between the overstuffed armchairs in the waiting area. A sigh-grunt of exasperated boredom accompanied each impact. Eventually he landed backwards in a chair and peered over the back. He met Evan’s gaze.

Goosebumps rose on Evan’s arms. He was worried how the kid would react. Since he’d gotten his ‘new’ face, as he thought of it, he had no way of knowing how people were going to treat him. Some recoiled, some fought through it. Almost everyone stared.

He gave the boy a tentative wave and what he hoped was a friendly smile. That was another thing—he had to re-learn how his facial expressions looked. What used to be a beaming grin now looked something like a wild animal baring its teeth. After a tense few seconds, the boy waved back, and Evan felt himself relax.

The kid was still staring at Evan, as if this strange-looking man was the best potential source for entertainment in this den of soccer moms and funny-smelling shampoo.

Being a hero is all about the little things, Evan thought, then crossed his eyes at the boy. The kid giggled, then stuck his tongue out. Evan folded his lips into his mouth and puffed out his cheeks. The kid tugged on his ears and bared his teeth.

They fired back and forth several more times until Evan found his quiver of ridiculousness running low. Time to for the coup de grace.

He touched the tips of his thumb and forefingers together, as if making an ‘okay’ sign on each hand, then flipped his hands towards himself at the wrist, centering his upside-down hands over his eyes like some kind of strange superhero mask.

And then he screamed.

He managed to bite down on the sound so it came out as more of a yelp, but it caused several of his fellow patrons to jump and practically everyone in the salon to stare at him.

“Uh, sorry… poked myself in the eye,” Evan muttered lamely. He could feel his cheeks burning with embarrassment, but that particular emotion barely registered compared to the goosebump-raising, heart-pounding fear and confusion that was racing through his brain.

What was that?

When he’d put his hands up to his eyes and looked through the loop—on his left side, specifically—he saw something—something that had sent his mind racing.

Can I do that again?

Under the pretense of rubbing his eye (though he doubted at this point that anybody would think he was any weirder otherwise), Evan raised his left hand to his eye again. When his fingertips met and the loop completed, he inhaled sharply with surprise and tried to make sense of what he saw.

Seen through the fingers of his left hand, his reflection hadn’t so much changed as it had had something superimposed over it. He saw himself wreathed in what he could best describe as tendrils, seemingly springing from his body, yet never actually touching him, fading out of view just before they made contact. Most of them seemed to be no more than a couple inches in diameter, and the ones he could see the ends of seemed to terminate in slightly-tapered, fingertip-like blunt ends. They didn’t seem to have a color of their own, but for some reason, they gave him the impression of being a deep, rich, almost metallic blue. He liked that. It fit him.

Is this my aura, like those new-age mystics talk about? Are they right about this stuff?

Questions unconsidered ricocheted around his mind, but Evan let them wait. He was focused on what he could perceive. As surreptitiously as he could, he turned his gaze to the other patrons. They, too, were surrounded by their own cloud of wispy tendrils, but none seemed to be as vividly colored, expansive, or active as his own. He cast his finger-monocled gaze upwards and saw his own… cords? That seemed like a better description, or at least one that made him feel more comfortable than ‘tendrils' or, God forbid, ‘tentacles'—Reaching to the ceiling and fading into the paneling. When he looked back down, he could faintly see faded blobs of color through the wall behind the mirror. He followed one's movements and grinned as it came into focus when its owner passed in front of the salon window.

This is it! This is the start! I just have to figure out what—whoops!

The stylist had finished his phone call and was headed back towards Evan. With some concern, Evan noticed that he was going to brush into the cobalt cords floating around him. When he got close, with a reflex no more conscious than flinching aside when someone walks too close, the cords flitted aside. Evan grinned.

I can move them! I can control it! This is so exciting! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

The hell you suits want to talk to me for? You ICE? You can fuck right off.  My grandfather moved here legally from Puerto Rico in the 60s, and that means I'm a fucking American, whether you like it or not.  I know I got a juvie record, but I ain't been in trouble for five years and—

What bureau?  That bureau?  Shit. Uh, I mean, sorry about that, sirs. Crazy times, you know?  Gets a guy jumpy.  

Strange? Strange how? You work at a gas station in the middle of the desert, you get strange more often than normal, dig?

…okay, there was one guy that stands out.  It was… four days now, I think.  About 4 in the afternoon.  Kinda slow, just a couple folks in here.  Then this big fucker walks in.  Well over six feet, like three feet wide, more’n a foot thick. He's wearing these big-ass sunglasses and, uh, yeah, it was an Ohio State hat.  I remember that.  Colorado's pretty far from home for a buckeye, right?  Weird.  

Anyway, this guy kinda glances at me, and then I kinda see him freeze, just for a second.  Like, he just stutters in place for like a quarter-second, like film skippin’.  And I can tell he's trying to look at me, but he's trying to hide it.  He goes around towards the back by the coolers and I gotta look away, I got customers. After I ring up a couple people, I look up again, checking in the anti-shoplifting mirror back there, and my blood just fuckin' freezes, because he's looking right back at me in the mirror.  We musta made eye contact, man.  It was some of the scariest shit I've ever seen.

So he's hanging back, obviously waiting for everyone else to leave, and I'm thinking, shit, he's gonna rob the place.  I try to get a better look at him, because fuck, for all I know I'm gonna have to describe this guy to the cops later—if he doesn't kill me.

It ain't like I've never been held up before, but you don't really get used to it, I don't care how badass some dudes tend to be.  Being under a gun blows.  So by the time the store empties out and this guy starts heading towards the counter, I am panic-tweaking, man.  I'm trying to take in as many details as I can; it's like time's slowing down.  And as I look at this guy, I realize I have no idea what ethnicity this guy is.  He's got a big forehead and this slicked-back ponytail that make me think he's some kinda Indian—native, I mean, you get those guys here from time to time—but his skin’s this weird olive-red color that makes him looks like a sunburned half-Latino or something, and he's got those big lips like some black guys got. So fuck if I can tell.  And he gets closer, and I see his nose is all kinds of fucked up.  Like, it was broke down, and then left, and then right, and then back kinda towards the center so it zig-zags all over his face and is big and flat.  There's this huge gash running across it, all the way across his face.  

Right, the scars, Jesus.  Two of ‘em up the right side of his neck all the way onto his cheek, one big one down his lips right to the left of his nose, and then his left cheek just… you know how people look when they get a new face after they get mauled or burned or some shit? Like that but not really smooth.  All ground up looking but still kinda smoothed over, like, sandpapered, if that makes sense.  I think part of his ear was gone, too.  Real fucked up stuff, like… how's this guy still alive, you know?

So I'm staring at him like a jackass, and he’s just staring at me.  I realize all of a sudden he’s come up to the counter and I’m like, oh yeah, I was thinking this guy was gonna rob me.  But before I can hit the alarm, he reaches up and pulls off those sunglasses, and this guy’s got the bluest fuckin’ eyes I’ve ever seen.  Maybe it was because they stood out against his skin, who knows.  But anyway, he kinda looks to the side, like he’s nervous, and then he says, in this weirdly soft voice for a guy his size, “I know this is rude, but I can’t think of any other way to ask it.  What are you?”

Then I realize.  This motherfucker is aware.  Newly aware.  He can see I’m not human.  That I'm an orc.  But I feign dumb, act all indignant for a bit, but he's just staring into my eyes with this… I dunno, what's the word? ‘Earnesty'? And it just all comes apart.

I kinda falter for a second, look down, feel kinda ashamed for some reason.  He asks me if I smoke, and what kind.  He buys a pack and tells me that I should take a break, hands me the smokes.  I tell my manager I'm taking a break and follow this guy outside.

We wind up sitting on the curb behind the station, and for a couple minutes he doesn't say anything. I can basically hear him thinking, like he's sorting through all the questions he has, real deliberately.  And then, real hesitantly, and apologizing again, he asks what I am. So we go back and forth, me answering and him asking.  I'm an orc, I was born this way to human parents, we don’t really have any special powers, I only know a few other paranormals, the illusion happens naturally. He asks a lot of questions that I don’t know the answer to, like deep questions.  Is the illusion a property of paranormals or of the human brain, can a person become aware by accident, how many people are aware per million, that sort of thing. Real big-picture stuff.  After I tell him I don’t know this stuff, and he seems kinda… embarrassed, I guess.  He was sorta hard to read.  Real expressive, but all the scars and shit made it kinda hard to tell what he was actually expressin’.

After he got embarrassed he sorta excused himself, but he asked if I had ever heard of anyone who could maybe point him towards more information.  I told him that my cousin had once mentioned a pawnbroker in Albuquerque that dealt in magic trinkets, but I didn’t know much more than that. He thanked me—like, practically fell over himself thankin’ me—and passed me this huge wad of bills like it was nothing. Then he hopped in this big old RV towin’ a janky-lookin’ blue Bug and drove off south.  Before you ask, I didn’t catch the plate, sorry.

That sound like the guy you’re looking for?  I mean… I hope he ain’t in any trouble.  He seemed pretty decent to me.  Kind of a dork, I guess, but real well-meaning.  Hell, he gave me enough money that I can finally get my girl an engagement ring.  

Evan shoved the cabin door open and stomped inside, trying hard to keep himself from panicking.  It had taken him a whole hour to drag Carmichael's carcass sufficiently far into the woods, and half an hour more to find his way back to the cabin.  The crescent moon was now high and bright in the sky, which meant Evan was running out of time.

He gave the rune a cursory glance as he strode towards the bedroom.  It was still glowing; in fact, it seemed to be glowing even brighter now that the moonlight was shining on it through the window.  Assuming that was as good a sign as any, Evan strode into the bedroom.

Considering himself fortunate that Carmichael had been enough of professional not completely toss the place, Evan gathered up the contents of his bags in one big armful and hurried back into the main room.

This goes here, that goes there… Clutching his notes in one hand, Evan set about placing the esoteric miscellany of the ritual's components in their designated spots.  After everything was in its place, he began placing voice recorders around the apex points of the sigil.  This was the part he was most uncertain about.  Nothing in the notes said anything about the nature of the people involved with the ritual, so he was banking on recordings of himself chanting to stand in for having friends.  

It was time for a last-minute check.  Evan took off his jacket and unstrapped the MANUS from his forearms.  He needed his arms uncovered because a component of the final stage of the ritual was on one of them.  

A simple tattoo, still slightly tender from its recent creation, adorned the inside of his left forearm.  He hadn’t wanted anything fancy, and fortunately, the ritual didn’t call for anything fancy.    It had only called for a tattoo of some kind of symbol of personal importance, infused with a strange mixture of (thankfully harmless) ground-up minerals.  It had been a bit of work to find a tattoo artist willing to use ink Evan had provided himself, but if there was one thing Evan had learned recently, it was that the ability to bribe people might as well have been a superpower on its own.

It was four simple words in blue in a vaguely gothic script: BE YOUR OWN HERO.  The first three words were smaller and sat above the fourth.  Evan thought it looked decent enough, but he was well aware that graphic design was not a particularly strong suit of his.  The ‘O' of ‘HERO' didn't connect completely; a very thin line of bare skin bisected the loop.  Closing that was the lynchpin of the ritual.  Another indicator that this was not intended to be a solo endeavor—the subject of the ritual had to be holding both the focus and the Book itself in separate hands during the whole thing, which made finishing the tattoo something of a tricky task.  He'd done a few dry runs, though, and was convinced he could successfully (if not steadily) manipulate a needle with Mr. Nex clenched in the same hand.  It wouldn't be pretty, but, well, neither was he.

Magic book.  Makeshift tattoo needle.  Stuffed giraffe.  As good of components for a world-changing ritual as any.  Components in hand, Evan sat down cross-legged in the middle of the rune, took a deep breath, and said, “System: Begin sequence.”

The voice recorders beeped to life.  Evan’s own voice, phonetically reciting languages he didn’t know, echoed around him in an unnerving chorus.  After a few minutes, the air in the cabin began to take on a slightly greasy feeling. The light from the rune began to stretch upwards, extending several feet over Evan’s head.  Evan felt his heart rate quicken.  It’s working!  It’s actually working!  He tightened his grip on Mr. Nex and prayed, not for the first time, that being the conduit for ancient magic wouldn’t prove terminally destructive to his childhood friend.  

It had been maybe fifteen minutes.  Evan couldn’t see the walls of the cabin any more.  The scintillating lights had grown more intense, more opaque; before it had reached up to the ceiling, it had begun to curve in on itself.  A dome of light nearly surrounded Evan, with only a small, rapidly-shrinking clearing directly above his head.  The air felt volatile, and Evan swore he could hear sounds beyond the recordings of his own voice.  He couldn’t figure out what it was, almost as if he couldn’t focus on it, like the auditory version of grasping for an almost-remembered thought. Was it music?  

Evan checked his watch. Only a few minutes now.  It was evident that the ritual was approaching its climax, even without the timer; the light was now a complete dome above him and it felt as though something were pressing on his skin, searching for a way in.  It was like being underwater if the water was half as dense as normal.  Evan couldn’t decide if the sensation was comforting or frightening.  

There.  A small chime in the remaining voice track.  It was time.  Evan shifted his grip on the needle and turned his forearm upwards.  Wincing slightly as he pricked his skin, he spoke aloud the puzzling final phrase of the ritual.

“I accept this responsibility for the good of all.”

The light suddenly went dark, and for a moment, Evan thought he’d done something wrong.  Then he realized he couldn’t see the wall.  His first impression was that his night vision had simply been erased by the glow.   But… he could see himself perfectly.  There were no spots in his eyes.  There was

Falling.  Falling inwards.  Falling into myself.  How far down? How far will OH GODDDDDDD

He didn’t remember much of it afterwards, just faint impressions, like emotions attached to memories he’d forgotten.  Every time tried to recall details, they seemed to change.  Puzzlingly, he seemed to recall standing in what seemed to be a darkened subway car at some point.  Each time he thought about the memory, there were different people in the car: sometimes it was full of varying numbers of shadowy figures, other times, he was alone, and he once swore he heard the door open and someone enter behind him.  He never was sure when he got off the train, if he ever did.  There was a constant sensation of being simultaneously pushed in all directions, of being compressed down while expanding rapidly, all contradictory sensations that added up to a glimpse of something massive beyond scale and more intimate than the dearest of secrets.  He felt as though he'd glimpsed the infinite and, instead of being rendered inchoate by his relative insignificance, had understood, just for an instant, his place in the whole thing.

 Significance.

Eventually, he found himself lying on the floor of the cabin.  He wasn't sure how long he'd been out, but the sun was up.  He was exhausted; whatever he'd been doing for the past several hours, it wasn't sleeping.  His body didn't so much ache as it felt loose and weak, like he'd been dancing for hours. For all he knew, he might have been.

With some effort, he sat up. A thought struck him suddenly and he felt panic begin to grip his chest, but before the fear could even take root, he looked down and saw Mr. Nex, looking none the worse for wear, still clutched in his hand.  With a happy sob, Evan hugged the stuffed giraffe to his chest and stood up.  

He barely managed to stumble into the bedroom and line himself up with the bed before exhaustion took over.  The straw mattress felt like heaven.

When Evan woke up, the sun had begun to set.  Did he feel different?  He couldn’t tell.  He tried not to think about it too much as he cleaned up the remnants of the rune, rearranged the furniture, and disarmed all the traps and alarms he could remember setting. If he thought about it too much, he might start imagining things.  It was done, and it had worked, and now it was time to figure out the next step. But first he had to get back to the RV—back home.  

God, it’s beautiful out here, he thought, turning to take in the sunset over the trees as he left the cabin.  Maybe it had something to do with the ritual, maybe it was just the afterglow of accomplishing a goal, but he felt like he could appreciate everything just a little more now.  He had a long way to hike and it was getting dark, but he wasn’t worried.  As he set off through the trees, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he felt the urge to sing, as surely as if he could actually hear the music:

“Don’t call it a comeback.

After locking the door, Evan staggered back into the bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed.  He’d won, and there was still plenty of time before he’d have to begin the ritual.  He hadn’t even gotten hurt.  Hopefully Carmichael had had enough punishment and would leave, or at least have the decency to pass out for a few hours.  His homemade weapons had worked like a charm—he was proud of that, even if he couldn’t remember building them.   All in all, it went about as well as he could have hoped.

Another gunshot snapped him out of his self-congratulatory reverie.  Of course.  A man as over-equipped as Carmichael wouldn’t have come all this way with just one gun. Evan sighed.  If he was going to make this much trouble…

Evan reached under the bed. Fortunately, Carmichael wasn’t the only one who’d brought more than one firearm.  He still had no idea what compelled him to buy a gun as stupidly extra as an S&W 500, but maybe the huge revolver would convince Carmichael that he was Not Fooling Around.  

Checking first to make sure that we was still in fact wearing his armor, Evan flung the door open and shoved the gun out into the night.  Nothing.  Carmichael was laying where Evan had left him, but he’d pulled the mask off and had his hand up next to his head.  Dread washed over Evan like he’d suddenly fallen into a frozen pond.  

“No no no, what the hell did you do?” Evan said, mainly to himself. Carmichael wasn’t going to respond. He was no longer able to.  The hand by his head was holding a tiny double-barreled pistol.  A small wisp of smoke was still rising lazily out of one of the barrels and a small hole leaked blood just about his temple.  

He’d shot himself.  

Evan slumped down to the ground next to the body.  He felt like he might cry.  Why had he done that?  Was this some kind of suicide mission?  Was somebody holding someone important to him hostage, and he couldn’t face the consequences of failure?  Was this Evan’s fault?  

Blinking back tears, Evan looked over the dead man’s face.  A square jaw, thin lips, deep-set eyes, an average-sized nose.  Perfectly nondescript.  The most remarkable thing about him was the blood that had leaked from his nose and the strange expression of concentration on his face.

Wait.

Evan was certain he’d broken Carmichael’s nose at least once in the fight.  It should have been sideways.  His guilt temporarily suppressed by curiosity, Evan crawled over to the body and leaned over to examine the face closer.  

Carmichael blinked and looked him dead in the eye.  

Evan barely had time to rear back in surprise before the hitman’s other arm swung around, a jagged knife clenched his fist.  The blade caught Evan in the mouth, just to the left of his nose.  Before he could even cry out, Carmichael was on him, leaning all his weight on the knife.  There was a gurgle, a crunch, and Carmichael felt the far end of the knife slide into the dirt.  Evan twitched once, then fell still.

 Carmichael let out a long breath and stood up, brushing himself off.  He reached up his temple and wiped the blood away, then did the same for his face.  

“Not bad, kid.  Didn’t have to be this way, but…”

Carmichael shrugged to himself, then walked into the cabin.  He paused for a moment to regard the strange glowing symbol, ‘tsk’ed, and walked into the bedroom.  After a few moments of sifting through the assorted bags he found, Carmichael simply upended them all onto the bed.  

“There we go.”

Advanced Quantum Mechanics: A Practical Guide.  The book wasn’t as big as Carmichael had expected, but it was conceivably thick enough to hold something else inside it. Brushing aside a few loose pieces of trash that had fallen out of the bag, he reached down to open the cover and—

“I’LL EAT YOUR FUCKING EYES, YOU RANCID PIECE OF SHIT!”

A heavily-muscled arm was suddenly wrapped around Carmichael’s neck from behind, choking him and dragging him backwards.  He’d been pulled out of the bedroom before he knew what was happening.  By the time he’d managed to pull a knife from his chest rigging and open it, he was almost outside.  He stabbed backwards and the knife ineffectively slid off something hard and smooth.  

Carmichael felt himself begin to black out.  In a last-ditch effort, he stabbed downwards and felt the blade sink into flesh.  His attacker howled in pain and began to collapse, but they were falling on top of him with their arm still around his neck---

KKRNCH.

 Evan rolled off of Carmichael’s limp body, groaning and gurgling in pain.   It hurt so bad that his vision was blurring; though, he reasoned, that might also have something to do with the huge knife still stuck in his face. Probably should do something about that, he thought as he almost-nonchalantly tugged the smaller knife from his thigh.  The ache of the wound and feeling of blood rushing from it was almost an afterthought when compared to the utterly invasive agony splitting his face in two.  It was amazing that he’d been able to scream out his threat at Carmichael with the knife still sticking out of his mouth.  For not the first time, Evan was thankful he didn’t have a gag reflex.  The last thing he needed was to additionally be choking on the knife that should have killed him.

Evan crossed his legs, sat up straight, and breathed deeply through his nose, trying to ignore the smell of his own blood.  He wrapped one hand around the hilt, then clenched the fist in his other hand.  He whimpered.  Even the slightest movement on the blade sent blunt fire roaring through the roof of his mouth, all the way back and out the back of his head. Gingerly, he reached around and patted the base of his skull.  When his fingers touched metal, a rusty buzzsaw raced down his nerves and exploded behind his eyes.  Fighting through both the blinding flashes and gushing tears, Evan grabbed the handle of the knife again and began to pull.

The serration sawed at his palette, the grinding ripping of the skin sending a fresh wave of blood into his mouth.  

He coughed it out and continued to pull.

He felt teeth being pushed out of place, in addition to the ones that had been knocked out in the initial stabbing.  

He didn’t know if they were grow back.  He kept pulling.  

The blade stopped moving. The pressure on the back of his skull told him that the tip of the knife, curved ever so slightly upwards, was not entering the way it had exited.  

Well, he wasn’t going to wiggle the damn thing around and try to work it lose, that was for sure.

Evan closed his eyes tightly and took a long, shaky breath.  Like pulling off of a band-aid.

He pulled with all his might.  

 Each individual pain was robbed of its own voice, each sensation blending together into an unholy amalgamation of torture.  The knife fell into the dirt along with a few teeth and chunks of flesh as Evan shrieked. If he’d been of a mind to do so, he would have compared it to the recording of his brain-drilling, but he was too busy vomiting.  

Stomach acid got in the wounds.  Chunks of food, blood, and bile sprayed all over his lap.  And among it all, he could feel twin sensations of tightening and pressure.

“Come on, come on, fucking heal!” Evan pleaded hoarsely as he doubled over.  The tightness was replacing the indistinct agony in the roof of his mouth, and he realized it was the feeling of his skin binding to itself.  The pressure suddenly subsided as new teeth burst from his gums, joining their fellows as the misplaced tissue slid back into place.  It didn’t feel good by any stretch of the imagination; if anything, it felt like he was experiencing the wounds in reverse.

A few moments of primal screaming later and the worst of it seemed to be over.  A quick search with his tongue revealed nothing out of the ordinary, much to his relief.  There was still a hole in his face, though.

Evan spat several times, clearing the blood and phlegm from his mouth as best he could.  A new sensation was coming from his face.  He raised his fingers to his lip, still torn wide open all the way up next to his nose.  He could feel the skin regrowing, building off the nearby tissue like super-accelerated lichen growth.  But it felt different.  It felt coarse and tough, and before he knew it, Evan had a new, gruesome scar splitting his lips and running up and down his face.  It reached halfway up to his eye and nearly down to his chin.  

“Mother fucker,” Evan said glumly, running his thumb down the rough skin.  All in all, it was a small price to pay, but… he glanced over at Carmichael’s corpse.  

“Serves you fucking right,” Evan grumbled, glaring at the dead man’s vacant expression.  Was he going to spring up and try to kill him again? Was this fight going to go on forever, neither of them able to kill the other?  How was Carmichael doing that?  Was he the same kind of… whatever as Evan was?  

Tik-tik-tik-tik-whrrrrrrrr.

Evan barely heard it over the sound of his own heartbeat and pained breathing, but a very faint mechanical sound was coming from the corpse.  Not even sure he’d heard it, he crawled closer.  Yes, there was something there, something clicking and whirring away on Carmichael’s person.  Something hard at work.  

“No way…” Lead by wonder more than self-preservation, Evan leaned closer.  It was coming from somewhere on Carmichael’s torso.  From… in his torso?  Evan tilted his ear closer, leaning down to where he was almost touching the mercenary’s body armor….

Beep-beep-beeeeeep!

“Ohhhh hell.”

Evan jerked away from Carmichael’s body as it spasmed violently.  As Evan pushed himself to his feet, Carmichael sat bolt upright at breakneck speed and, without so much as pausing, punched Evan straight in the crotch.

It didn’t have the expected result.  Instead of doubling over, Evan grabbed Carmichael’s head in both hands and drove his knee into his face.  Carmichael toppled over with Evan on top of him again.  This time, Evan kept his grip on Carmichael’s skull and tried his best to get his leg on the hitman’s neck.  Carmichael managed to get an arm under Evan’s knee and was trying to pull his hand off his skull with the other, but Evan slid his opposite hand down and shoved his thumb in Carmichael’s eye.  Carmichael howled and thrust his arm upward, catching Evan in the throat.  

Evan retched and fell sideways, though the pain was gone before he hit the ground.  Carmichael rolled over and lunged on top of him.  Evan crossed his arms across his face before Carmichael started punching, so Carmichael instead attempted to get his hands around Evan's neck.  Evan jerked his head downwards and bit down on the hitman's thumb.  Carmichael screamed and started swinging with his free hand while Evan bit down harder.  

Both of us can heal from massive injuries, but he doesn't seem to heal in real time.  He must have some kind of implant that only activates when he dies, Evan thought, shaking Carmichael’s hand like a dog with a caught groundhog.  But if I can't deactivate it, I can't be certain I can stop him.  Can I even break it?  I have to get to it first…

Carmichael had produced another knife from somewhere and was trying to get it to Evan's throat.  Evan grabbed his wrist with his left hand and slid his right fist against Carmichael’s stomach.  He spit out Carmichael's hand and shouted—

“There's only one magical component to these things right now, and you should only use it if it's an emergency, because I think it can only work once a day,” the recorded Evan said, tapping a metal tube on the top of the right gauntlet.  He picked up something that looked like a copper coin off the table in front of him.  “This little thing discharges a small electrical charge when its command word is spoken.  Not much by themselves, but they ‘stack’, I guess you'd say.  This tube is packed with them.  It's a pretty close range weapon, but if you really have to get someone out of your face permanently, you just need to yell—”

“SHAZAM!”

Evan had accepted that he wouldn't be prepared for the side effects of the weapon his former self had cobbled together out of magic trinkets, but he trusted that he'd've made something that at least wouldn't kill him when he used it.  

He was mostly right.  

The thing that startled him the most was the recoil.  His elbow slammed painfully into the dirt as the world went white.  Evan barely heard himself scream as he was shocked through Carmichael.  The super-sharp whipcrack of the lightning gun firing almost defeaned him, and the miniature thunderclap afterwards didn't help.  

So… his muscles were seizing, he couldn’t see, his ears were ringing, he tasted blood from how hard his jaw was clenching, and he was pretty sure he could smell, in addition to the ozone, his nosehairs burning.  It was a sensory buffet of misery.  On the plus side, there was no way he’d missed.  Carmichael was still straddling him, but he’d stopped moving.  Evan’s vision was already coming back, albeit filled with jagged blue-white lines like cracks across glass.  He managed to unfreeze his face and jerked his head forward.

The movement caused Carmichael to shift and slide off of Evan, hitting the ground with a dull thud. Evan pushed himself up and scrambled to his feet, jumping back from the recumbent figure in case the gun hadn't done enough.  

 He needn't have worried. There was a sizzling hole in Carmichael's armor that extended well through the flesh beneath.  There was surprisingly little blood.  The edges of the wound were burned black all the way through and were still smoking and sizzling.  Evan crept closer and saw that some of the smoke was even rising out of the hitman's back; the blast had gone clear through and burned away nearly all the flesh in its path.  Only the bones seemed to be relatively intact, but only just, either scorched black or stained by the smoke and gore.  Even the cartilage between his vertebrae had been scorched away.  But amidst all the red and black, something glinted.

There!

Before he could think about what he was doing, Evan shoved his hand into the hole.  He yelped as a combination of superheated tissue and leaking digestive fluids burned his skin, but his fingers brushed something hard and smooth and he closed his fist around it.  It took a couple tugs, but he managed to pull out the vertebra it was attached to.

Evan collapsed backwards, breathing hard.  His head and heart were pounding, his ears were still ringing, and half his body was still aching from the shock.  But he’d won.

Right?

He looked back at Carmichael’s body.  Insofar as his face bore any expression, it was one of startled anger.  Evan sighed.

“Couldn’t even have the decency to look scared, huh,” Evan muttered to the corpse.  He felt bad. Sure, Carmichael had been trying to rob and then kill him, and had sort of succeeded at the second one, but… did he have to kill him?  

I couldn’t have stopped him otherwise.  He’d keep finding ways to get back into the fight.

That’s a good excuse.

I did not enjoy that at all.  I had to finish it or he’d ruin the ritual.  

Ends, mean, and in-betweens.  Sounds like you—

Evan was jolted out of his internal debate by a shrill beeping coming from the thing in his fist. He opened his hand and gave the thing a good look for the first time.  It was basically a metal sphere, about an inch across, attached to the vertebra by a small bracket wrapped around its circumference.  It was completely smooth and seemed to have no seam or openings, but as Evan watched, the surface of the sphere rippled like water and a small metal arm, no bigger than a sewing needle, emerged from within.  

Evan yelped and dropped the thing.  It beeped again as it hit the ground, then it began to flick its metal arm back and forth as if feeling for something.  Evan watched it for a moment, taking in the added strangeness that this little ball brought to an already strange day.  He looked over at Carmichael’s body again, then back at the orb.  He knelt down and gingerly picked the thing up, keeping the probing arm pointing away from him.

“Alright.  Guess it’s good guy time.”

-------------

“Wake up, you reprehensible prick.”

Carmichael started as he regained consciousness.  There was a blinding light in his eyes, making it impossible to see anything but the light. The light, and the barrel of the massive revolver that was being pointed straight at his face.

“Wha—”

“No.  You don’t talk.  When I ask you a question, if your answer is anything other than ‘yes’, I shoot. Got that?”

Carmichael paused for a moment, trying to focus on the face of his assailant.  

“I said, ‘GOT THAT?’” The voice roared.

“…yes.”

“Good.” The voice softened slightly.  “You’ve cost me a lot of time, sweat, and blood.  That’s cost you your gear and your fancy resurrection implant.”  

The memory of the huge flash of light burst into Carmichael’s mind.  He frantically patted at his chest, but found only the burned remains of his armor and healthy, unmarked skin there.  

“But it needn’t cost you your life,” the voice continued.  “It turns out that thing works from the outside, too.  I’ll be keeping it.  Consider it payment for fucking with me.

“I’ve dragged you back into the woods.  Not the way you came from.  Maybe. If you head downhill you should eventually find a road.  If you come for me again, I’ll kill you, and this time, I’ll make it stick.  Got me?”

“…yeah.”

“I won’t say it was nice meeting you, Mr. Carmichael.  I sincerely hope we never seen each other again.  Don’t waste this chance.  Lights out.”

Beep-beep-beep.

“Shit.”

That was an alert from a proximity sensor. Whoever was following Evan had finally caught up to him, two hours later.

Evan took a slow, deep breath and sat up. He calmly stood up, laid his notes on the desk, and got down on the floor to reach under the bed. He came up with a double-barreled shotgun and a box of shells. Slowly but deliberately, he opened the gun’s breech and slid the shells in, one after the other. He took another deep breath, trying to steady his pounding heart, and swung the breech closed.

“Alright, then.”

He reasoned his best bet was to get outside and meet his pursuer in the open; a cramped cabin with a single means of entrance and exit would make a terrible place for a confrontation, especially if he needed to escape. There was also the concern that an indoor scuffle might ruin the rune on the floor. So he had to get outside, but there was still the problem of the single door. He was going to be a huge, backlit target if he just strolled outside.

Best to address that as much as he could before opening the door, then, he reasoned. Crouching so as to not be visible through the window, Evan made his way to the dull copper oil lamp that provided most of the illumination for the room. As the spitting, dancing flame died down to a quivering ember, the room became enveloped in eerie twilight. Evan felt his pulse quicken. The darkness, held at bay only by the light of the rune; the silence of the forest, rapidly filling with the sound of his own heartbeat; the warm Summer air, quickly chilling as his blood ran cold; all these things reminded Evan of the very real possibility that he was about to die.

Evan shook himself. There was no time to think about that, not if he wanted to prevent it from actually happening. The backlighting issue was addressed; now he needed to deal with actually opening and getting out the door. He’d initially considered crouching beside the doorframe and pushing it open while still hiding behind the wall, but that seemed too obvious. If this guy was a professional, he might assume his victim was hiding just out of sight and pepper the suspicious area with bullets. Evan doubted that the wood, stout as it was, would do much to stop a hail of gunfire.

Still crouched, Evan slunk back into the bedroom and fetched a spool of thin rope from his pack. Using one of the legs of the woodburning stove as a fulcrum, he managed to rig a system where he could pull the door open without being in the actual room. With the shotgun balanced in the crook of his elbow, Evan positioned himself beside the bedroom doorframe and yanked the rope.

If the universe had a sense of drama, the door would have creaked ominously on its hinges as it swung open. As it was, it dragged and scraped across the uneven floor, emitting an embarrassing mix of rumbling and screeching. Evan let his breath out. He’d half-expected the silence to be shattered by a gunshot the second anything moved, but aside from the now-audible sounds of nature and the feel of a faint breeze, nothing had changed.

Squinting to the point of his eyes nearly closing, Evan glared out into the darkness as if daring something to happen. A few long moments passed and no menace materialized out of the shadows, which made Evan pout his lips in an annoyed frown. Maybe his methods were too obvious. He kept trying to think like a hired killer would think, but found he had little information to draw on beyond action movies and thriller novels. He gave up and decided to go back to basics.

On the lawn outside the cabin was an old, forgotten firepit, its remaining stones covered with moss and hidden by the grass. Evan could see the corner of one of the stones from his hiding spot, and it gave him idea. He crawled back to his gear and dug around until he found something he’d purchased on impulse: a “professional” slingshot, complete with a small supply of ball bearings. He’d bought it because he’d seen it in the clearance bin while he was shopping for much more important things, and it reminded him of his younger days. That, and it was under ten dollars.

Never thought nostalgia would come in handy, Evan thought, tearing into the blister packaging with his teeth. He settled back into position, a handful of metal marbles in his right palm and the slingshot in the left. He peeked around the corner again, spotted his target, and readied a bearing. Fingers pinched tightly around the little steel ball, Evan extended his left arm, stretching the bands taught, and then whipped around the corner and let the shot fly.

CRACK.

Evan swore and ducked back down again. That was a lot louder than he’d been expecting--mainly because he’d hit the doorframe instead of the rocks outside. So much for the element of surprise, then.

Evan spun back around the doorframe, standing fully upright this time, and fired several frantic shots into the darkness. He heard clacks and cricks as some of the shots hit the stones, and more shiffs and swishes as most of the bearings shot off into the trees. Hopefully that would be enough misdirection, because it was going to have to be.

Evan dropped the slingshot and scooped up the shotgun, then, head down and knees pumping, dashed for the door. He crossed the threshold and burst into the night, shoes digging into the grass as he twisted himself, changing direction abruptly to circle around behind---

Bang.

It was loud and sharp, but not ear-splitting. Evan could actually hear the bullet whistle through the air for a split second before the shotgun was torn violently out of his hands. He stumbled to a stop, slowly raising his hands. He couldn’t tell where the shot had come from, but if the shooter was good enough to blast the gun out of his grip while he was in a dead run, he was certain they wouldn’t have trouble putting one between his eyes if the situation warranted it.

A figure stepped out of the trees to his left.  It was shorter than Evan but at least as broad, and dressed in a mixture of grays and browns that caused it to blend in with the shadows around it.  It moved towards him slowly, both hands clasping a large handgun in front of it. Evan turned slightly, hands still raised, to get a better look at his attacker.  

He—Evan was certain they were a he, now—was dressed as if he were about to storm a building under cover of night, not track someone through miles of forest.  He was wearing an oddly bulky balaclava, and at least some of his bulk came from the full-body armor he was wearing.  Magazine pouches, at least two knives, and other tactical miscellanea were strapped all over his body.  The pistol was huge, matte black, and imposing, with a bright silver silencer and a scope the length of the whole gun.  

Evan wasn’t quite sure what to make of this man.  He absolutely reeked of ‘trying too hard’.  But… he’d been able to track Evan, despite all his precautions.  Is he that good, or did I just do a lousy job?

The man relaxed his grip on the gun, lowering his left hand to his side and holding the pistol almost lazily at waist level.  He still kept it pointed at Evan as he walked closer, but he seemed more relaxed.  He stopped about five feet from Evan and looked him up and down.  Evan felt slightly irritated; the man’s demeanor was almost insultingly casual, as if he didn’t consider Evan anything more than a curious inconvenience.  

“Well?  What are you waiting for?  You’ve got me.  Just get it over with.”  There was probably no peaceful way out of this, Evan reckoned, so he might as well poke the bear.

The man was so close now that Evan could see him cock an eyebrow under his mask.  Brown eyes.  Caucasian.  He looked Evan over again, then, to Evan’s surprise, spoke.

“There a reason somebody would want you dead, kid?”

His voice was far more normal than Evan had expected, and Evan scolded himself for assuming that a bad guy would automatically sound like a bad guy.  It was a voice you could hear a dozen times every day.  He’s just a normal person, Evan reminded himself, and he found that thought emboldening him.

“A few, if I’m being honest.  That’s not why you’re here?”

“Not unless you make me,” the man said, with a casualness to his voice that belied the situation.  He leaned towards Evan, tilting his head slightly as he took a closer look. “Christ, what’d you do to your face?”

Evan felt a vein bulge in his neck.  That pissed him off.  He’d had people stare at him, but nobody had the sheer balls to come right up and say it.  If the man hadn’t had a gun pointed at him, he probably would have had some choice words for him.  But the gun was a definite variable in the equation, so Evan swallowed his anger and instead said, “What do you want?”

“Oh, come on now, kid,” the man scoffed.  “That book, genius.  Where is it?”

I was right!  Evan had to fight a smile.  The sense of vindication was enormous.  But it made the situation all the more dire.

“You think I’m just going to give it to you?  Do you know what it is?”

“Do you?  Really?”

Evan was rapidly coming to hate this man, even taking the fact that he was holding at gunpoint out of the equation.  As a witty retort was not forthcoming, he simply glared.  The man shrugged and sighed.

“Well, anyway, you don’t want to cooperate, no big deal.  I think I can find it.  So if you don’t want another piece of your face missing, you stay put.” Still keeping the gun pointed at Evan, the man slowly walked a wide loop around him, making his way towards the cabin door.  

Evan took a deep breath.  “Who’s paying you, Mr. Carmichael?”

The footsteps behind him stopped.  There was a quiet shifting sound.  Then: “What the hell did you say?”

“You’re Leon Carmichael, right?  ‘The Chameleon’?  After I noticed you tailing me, I did some homework to figure out who I was dealing with. I gotta say, it’s weird to meet an actual ‘deep web’ hitman in person. I hope you’re not getting paid in Bitcoins.  That shit’s gonna tank in, like a year, you know.”

Evan couldn’t stop himself from grinning.  The quickened breathing from behind him told him he’d hit the mark. The feeling of the silencer against the base of his skull confirmed that.

“Who the fuck are you?” Carmichael demanded, his voice low but dripping with anger as he slowly walked around Evan again.

Evan laughed.  “Oh, that doesn’t really matter, does it, Leon?  Do you mind if I call you Leon?  See, Leon, all that you have to know is that I’m so, so much smarter than you, that even when I couldn’t see you, I could pick up a pattern.  A hitman infamous for never being seen.  I figure you must be some kind of master of disguise, which is why I didn’t see you, but that truck of yours… man, how did you make it change color like that?  Some kind of photoreactive coating?  I’d heard the Air Force or somebody was working on that, but how’d you—“

“SHUT!  UP!” Spittle flew from Carmichael’s mouth as he leveled the pistol at Evan’s face.  “What the fuck is wrong with you?  Are you retarded or something?  Where’s. That.  Fucking.  BOOK?!”

The end of the silencer was an inch from Evan’s nose.  He could see it quivering slightly as Carmichael shouted.  He took a slow, steady breath.

“It’s in a backpack under the bed, inside a hollowed-out physics textbook,” Evan said, calmly, “but that doesn’t matter.”

“Why’s that, dipshit?”

“Because you’re about to get your ass beat.”

He twitched his right hand, causing his sleeve to drop down his arm, revealing…

-------

“I call it the Modular Armored Neutralizing Utility System, or MANUS for short,” his video self said, holding up a roughly tubular piece of metal.  “You wear it around your forearms, and it’s got a bunch of slots for tools and it should help stop blades and blunt objects, and, um…” He scratched his cheek, looking down from the camera.  “I was always bad at the sales pitch.  Right, I’ve got a couple of really cool little defense gadgets built in already, rigged up to a couple micro-computers I’ve got set up to voice commands.  For this one, you just have to bend your wrist like this and say—“

“LIGHTS OUT!”

40,000 lumens burst from the bottom of the MANUS.  Even with his eyes closed, Evan swore he could see the whole scene lit up in black and white.  As Carmichael yelled in pain and surprise, Evan swung his hand down onto the gun. Carmichael blindly fired two shots that made Evan’s ears ring, but he’d already pushed the barrel away.  

“You son of a bitch!” Blinking his streaming eyes, Carmichael struggled to turn the gun back towards Evan and squeezed the trigger frantically.  Evan had slid his hand up the weapon and wedged the skin between his thumb and forefinger beneath the hammer.  It hurt when the metal slammed down, but it beat getting shot.

Even blinded, Carmichael wasn’t relinquishing the gun without a fight, thrashing violently in an attempt to pull it from Evan’s grasp.  Evan, for his part, was trying to twist the gun with Carmichael’s finger still stuck in the trigger guard, but that meant Carmichael still had his finger on the trigger.  Evan knew it was only a matter of time before he managed to shake Evan’s hand loose from the hammer and started shooting again.  Wrenching the gun aside as best he could, Evan let go with his left hand and swung his left arm up next to Carmichael’s head.  

“GUERILLA RADIO!”  

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

A 150-decibel shriek shattered the quiet night air and bounced like a pinball off the mountains and trees.  Birds took flight.  Insects momentarily stopped singing.  Something off in the woods started to howl.  Evan could barely hear any of it over the painful echo ringing in his ears, but he wasn’t the one who’d had a directional speaker blaring a sound as loud as a jet engine an inch from his ear.  

If Carmichael screamed, it was drowned out by the blast, but the noise cannon had done its job.  For just a second, reflexes took over and his grip on the gun loosened slightly as he instinctively reached for his ears. Evan desperately hauled on the weapon, finally pulling it free.  Gripping it by the barrel, he swung his arm back and brought the grip down on the side of Carmichael’s head.  The force of the blow was so great that, combined with the disorientation from the flash and noise, both men wound up staggering several paces and falling to the ground.  

Evan still had the gun in his hand.  Though he was still half-blinded by the flash, Evan managed to eject the magazine and threw it as far as he could from his prone position.  It landed somewhere in the brush, and he hoped that was enough to take it out of the equation.

Staggering back to his feet, Evan saw Carmichael struggling to do the same.  From the way he was wobbling, Evan guessed that the noise blast had ruptured his eardrum.  For the moment, he was effectively immobilized.  Evan still had the pistol in his hand, and there was still a round in the chamber.  The thought of the possibility of finishing this now rushed into his head with such ferocity that it felt like it’d been injected there.

No.  Not this way. You don’t need to.

Evan squeezed the trigger and felt the gun kick as the last round slammed into the dirt.  Carmichael flinched at the report, then stared at Evan through runny eyes with what seemed like a look of confusion under his mask.

“I’m not gonna kill you,” Evan growled, dropping the gun and starting towards him, “but I am gonna make you regret taking this job!”

“What?!” Carmichael yelled back, far louder than necessary.

Evan sighed.  Note to self: deliver one-liners BEFORE deafening the audience.

Oh well.

Evan grabbed Carmichael by the collar of his body armor and yanked him upright.  The assassin barely kept himself from toppling forward from the momentum, but by the time he’d found his footing, Evan had already wound up and launched his punch.  

The knuckle of Evan’s middle finger slammed into the center of Carmichael’s face with such force it sent him sprawling back onto the ground further than his previous spot.  Evan shook out his hand, then realized something: aside from a brief spike of pain at the point of impact, his hand didn’t hurt.

Somewhat contrary to common sense, much research points to the advent of boxing gloves as the start of more brain injuries in boxers.  The reasoning behind this is deceptively simple: punching someone in the face with your bare hands hurts.  The human skull is, generally speaking, very hard.  But when you protect the hand that’s punching, the puncher doesn’t have to worry about breaking his own fingers and, therefore, can bring the full force of his punches to bear on his opponent’s face.  Sure, the bone doesn’t make direct contact, so you lose that aspect of the attack, but removing the limiter of the fear of self-mutilation more than makes up for the difference.

Evan realized that, as a man with the inexplicable ability to heal almost instantly, he could have his cake and eat it, too.  A grin began to spread across his face.  How had he not considered that?  Super-healing could be a weapon!  

Letting out a roar that was half-battle cry, half whoop of exultation, Evan dove onto Carmichael’s prone form and straddled the hitman’s chest.  Before Carmichael could recover from the shock of the first punch, Evan landed another across his jaw, roaring again as he threw the full force of his new muscles into the blow.  

Impact.  Brief flash of pain.  Nothing.

Yes.

He swung back his left arm, twisting his torso as he drove a straight punch into Carmichael’s right eye.

Impact.  Pain.  Nothing.

Yes.  Yes!

Right. Left. Right. Left. Right left right left right left rightleftrightleftrightleftRIGHTLEFTRIGHTLEFT

“Yes! Yes! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES YES YES YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAA—“

Amidst the flurry of blows, Carmichael somehow managed to get this arms up in front of his face and was grasping desperately at Evan, trying to either stop the punches or get his hands around his throat.  Evan bit his thumb, but Carmichael managed to keep his hand on Evan’s face, pushing him up enough that he couldn’t get a clear shot.  After a few frenzied swipes, Evan grabbed both of Carmichael’s wrists and yanked upwards while swinging his own head downwards.  

Crunch.  There was the sound of a nose breaking.  But Carmichael was still struggling.  

“Is that an armored ski mask?  Come on, man!  It won’t save you!” Evan heard himself yell as his head descended again.

Crunch. Crunch.  Crack. Whump.

Four more headbutts and Carmichael was barely moving.  All he seemed to be able to do was groan.  Evan rolled himself off the broken man and sat up, panting.  His heart was hammering in his chest, he could barely catch his breath, and he was dizzy from the adrenaline rush combined with the repeated head movements, but he felt amazing.  

The gentle crunching of leaves underfoot and the quiet swiff-swip sounds of branches brushing off his jacket might have been soothing and calming to someone other than Evan.  Someone who hadn't made this trek five times already and didn't have to keep finding new routes to a rickety cabin in the middle of the Ozarks.  Without any technological assistance.  Evan was, not for the first time, glad that he'd forced himself through the years of work to become an Eagle Scout.  He really didn't like being out in nature.  He appreciated it, he respected it, and he could survive on his own for at least a week in the woods if need be, but... God, he hated it out here.  His was the world of technology, of metal, of plastic and concrete and glass, of cities and industry and the press of human presence.  After this he was going to make a concentrated effort to spend a LOT of time around man-made lights and noise. This isolation was necessary for his purposes, though, and not just because he needed somewhere he could set up a ritual with very intricate and esoteric requirements.   It was because he was being followed.  

He'd started to notice it about a week ago.  He'd been going about the process of gathering reagents (he felt strange thinking about that word in the context of a real-world thing, as opposed to something fantastic) for the ritual (ditto with that word), which had been a relatively mundane, yet slightly surreal, process.  Most of the preparations involved easily found or made ingredients prepared in bizarre ways:  A few grams of powdered limestone, measured out by a small scoop hand-made (well, hand-bent, in this case) from aluminum which had been painted with a green paint mixed with cumin; a knife that had been used to cut cloth that had been used to make a bandage to mend a wound made from the same knife (Evan hoped that the fact that the wound closed in under a minute still made it count); a stone that had been skipped at least three times upstream in a river that the thrower was standing in while barefoot (he was not proud of how long it took for him to get that one right).  

All the preparations involved things he could pretty easily go about getting and doing, but would never have actually done.  There was just no reason to do any of it.  Evan found himself thinking that maybe that was the secret to keeping this all hidden.  Out of context, it all seemed like random nonsense.  Hell, in context it still seemed absurd.  But he'd seen evidence of the impossible, of the fantastically nonsensical, in his own body.  He'd tried what he couldn't help thinking of as 'magic tricks' based on his own notes.  Lighting a candle without a source of fire was amazing, even if it had taken him ten minutes.  But just because magic was real didn't mean the Book of Fate was, he'd realized.  He couldn't let himself fall into that trap of childlike wonderment or he’d be suckered by every paranormal con man he bumped into.

But if the Book was a hoax and nobody else would care, then why did he keep seeing the same pickup truck every couple hours, despite having moved across state lines over half a dozen times in five days?  Sure, it was always different colors, and the license plates were different, but there were little details he started noticing.  A little chip in the windshield on the upper driver's side.  The same pair of strangely expensive-looking binoculars on the dashboard or on the seat.  A tiny tear in the upholstery of the passenger's seat, near where the right shoulder of an average adult would have been.  A glove compartment with a very strong-looking lock.  It was too coincidental.  It was definitely the same truck.  

Evan hadn’t seen any sign of the driver, though, and that was what worried him.  He’d done some counter-surveillance of his own and had never seen a sign of somebody actually moving the truck.  He’d crouched on a rooftop for nearly eight hours and stared at the damn thing and nobody had touched it, but after he’d left for five minutes to find an alley to pee in, he came back to find it gone.  That was frustrating, but it proved to him that somebody was watching him very closely.  Evan found that both reassuring and very worrying.  

So he’d taken precautions.  A lot of elaborate, pain-in-the-ass precautions.  The RV was now locked up two states away and he’d been puttering around in the Beetle, trying to grab everything he needed without standing out much.  He kept seeing the truck, though, and that was why he was parking miles away from his ‘base’ each time and hiking for hours to attempt to throw off the trail.  He’d turned off his phone (he hadn’t even thought about it being traceable when he bought the replacement.  Amateur!) and disabled every piece of networkable electronics before he got anywhere near the edge of the forest.  Navigating by compass was inconvenient, but he was begrudgingly capable of it.  Hopefully the sheer volume of bullshit he was engineering would help guarantee him some privacy.The cabin he’d rented was almost impressive in how unimpressive it was.  Two rooms, no running water, heat and light from a tiny rusted generator backed up by a woodburning stove and oil lamps, an outhouse without no toilet seat.  Cozy.  But it was over five miles from anything resembling civilization;  that way, he figured, if he accidentally opened a gate to an inverse universe, set off an arcane nuke, or something equally catastrophic, the body count would be minimal.  

Hopefully.

Evan dropped his gear by the cabin’s triple-padlocked door, then walked calmly around to the back of the small building.  He leaned against the rough wooden wall and sighed deeply.  Though the late afternoon sun was casting long shadows, the tightly packed trees looked far from threatening.  Aside from the faint buzzing of insects and the occasional bird call, it was almost completely silent.  Even the wind didn’t make much noise, the bulwark of foliage reducing even the strongest of gusts to a light breeze.  This was nice, he finally admitted to himself.  He could see the appeal.  Maybe getting back to nature every now and then wasn’t too bad an idea.  There was a calmness, a stillness, a simplicity about it all that brought back nostalgia-shaded memories of campfires, chasing fireflies, and warm summer evenings filled with mystery and promise.  

Evan sighed again, smiling wistfully this time, and then went to check if the bear trap he’d hidden behind the outhouse was still set.  It was, as were most of the assorted snares, alarms, and other inconveniences he’d scattered about the perimeter about ten yards into the woods.  His paranoia temporarily sated, Evan returned to the front of the cabin and, after a few minutes of digging for keys and fighting with stubborn locks, let himself in.  

The cabin was, thankfully, just how he’d left it.  The meager furniture in the... living room?  Dining room?  The room that wasn’t the bedroom.  He’d moved almost all the furniture from this room into the room that was the bedroom.  In its place was an intricate, looping, eye-straining symbol that took up most of the room.  This thing, this rune, or sigil, or whatever, had, by far, been the biggest pain in the ass of the whole endeavor.  The instructions were very clear that the measurements need to be very precise.  There was very little margin for error.  This wouldn’t normally have been a problem for a detail-minded man like Evan, but the instructions were so ancient that he’d had to spent the better part of a day translating archaic units of measurement that he’d never even heard of into something he could work with.  Then he’d spent countless (Evan had actually counted, though; it was something close to thirty-two) consecutive hours outlining this thing, measuring, re-measuring, and marveling at the weird beauty of it.  And sweating and swearing.  Lots of that. 

The end result was, at first glance, a chaotic jumble of overlapping circles within circles and lines with no apparent purpose but to lay across the thing like a dropped handful of pick-up sticks.  The more you looked at it, though, you started to see how the pieces came together as a greater whole.  It was like the insides of an intricate watch, a mass of confusing pieces that coalesced into a beautiful, functional machine.  Evan was almost proud of it.  He still wasn’t certain that this thing would actually work, but he felt a sense of accomplishment from finishing it, even if it was basically a glorified connect-the-dots puzzle.

Evan’s doubts about the authenticity of the ritual--or, at least, his doubts that it was functional magic--were rapidly vanishing.  With the fading light of the setting sun reduced to a trickle by the room’s single curtained window, the symbol was glowing faintly.  The weird green-blue-white light somehow didn’t illuminate anything around it, despite the light itself somehow raising two or three inches out of the symbol.  It undulated and rippled slightly, like a miniaturized version of the Northern Lights tethered to the floor.  No heat came from it, and when had Evan carefully prodded it (after testing it with a stick first, to make sure it didn’t melt or burst into flames or something), his finger went right through it, registering only a slight tingling sensation.   Satisfied after a cursory examination of the rune (It’s still glowing, so I guess it’s still okay), Evan made his way into the bedroom to unpack.  Much like the...not-bedroom, it was sparse, even though he’d shoved all the furniture into it.  In total, there was a small kitchen table, three chairs, a smaller table that he supposed was supposed to be a desk, and a bed with a straw mattress.  Everything was lashed together out of barely-sculpted wood and coarse rope.  It was, at the very least, thematically coherent.  

Evan laid down on the bed, wincing slightly as the straw poked at him even through the sleeping bag he’d bought in an attempt to prevent exactly that.  It was annoying, but he reminded himself that, if everything went according to plan, tonight would be the last night he’d have to spend in this anachronism.  Better make sure I’ve got it right, then.  By the light of a Coleman lantern, Evan settled back on the scratchy mattress and began to review his notes.

Uh, okay, testing. Test. Tes-tiiiing. Alright. Uh, this is Evan Abrams and it’s… May 18th. So it’s been a week since I, uh, ‘woke up’, and I think I’ve got my head wrapped around this whole situation. I’m recording this as a kind of way to, you know, make sure everything’s in order, that I’ve got my plans together, all that. Plus, if I suffer another, uh, memory loss or something, I want an easy summary on hand. I don’t want to have to spend another week playing catch-up with my own life.

So, to summarize, a week ago today I found myself in a bar in Arizona with no memory of how I got there. I eventually figured out that I’d basically erased about three months of my memory through some hideous DIY surgery. I’m still not sure exactly why I did this to myself, and I seem to have sanitized the notes I kept from those missing months to keep myself from figuring it out.

Shit, I’m not doing this very well. The big picture is, I apparently discovered that the… supernatural? Is real. That word sounds wrong for describing this type of thing. But there’s magic, and monsters, and people with special abilities… I have so many notes about all kinds of things, I’m honestly amazed by the sheer volume of data I was able to gather.  I did it really well, too, really professional, I…

Okay, don’t get caught up in sucking your own dick, Evan. Oh yeah, that reminds me—sometime during the missing time I got really fucked up. Like, physically. My face looks like an old steak. Not sure how that happened. A few serious wounds on the rest of my body, too, but here’s the good news. Remember how I mentioned special powers? Apparently I’ve had one my whole life, but something ramped it up recently. I heal very quickly. The process leaves some serious scars, it seems, but the internal healing seems flawless. I have no residual pain from what I’m pretty sure are gunshot wounds.  Even if it’s been three months, that shouldn’t be possible. I hit my head really bad a few days ago and minutes later there was no sign of any injury. No pain, no mark, no blood except what got in my hair. According to my notes, my body can recover from near-mortal injuries in hours, if not minutes. Apparently it ‘focuses’, if you can assign some kind of intent to a biological process, on making me functional and mobile as soon as possible, so it rushes the skin repair. Keep me from losing too much blood, prevent infection, make sure it doesn’t get worse. I guess it scars up so bad because of that, but I think that’s a fair price to pay for being extremely durable.

This all kinda brings me back around to what my plan is going forward. I really hit the weights hard these past few months and I’m fucking huge now. My pre-brain erasure self got into a pretty serious exercise routine—at least two hours a day. I was worried it’d be a pain in the ass, but my body seems to remember the movements. It feels good. I’m so strong now, and I’ve been doing yoga and a bunch of really tough stretches and, well, I feel amazing. I feel like I could be sexy. Except for the face, I mean. Oh, uh, and I checked, it didn’t heal old injuries, so no improvement below the belt.  Oh well. Maybe there’s a possibility out there.

Okay… enough about that. I keep getting distracted. There’s just so much to take in. The reason I’ve been bulking up and did all this is because I decided to do something about… well, the intersection of the ‘normal’ world and this new one. Not go out hunting monsters or magic-users or whatever, but… just protect people who can’t defend themselves from things like that. Be an equalizing factor. Give people some protection from things they don’t even know they need protection from. Maybe keeping some of the bad things at bay will let things really improve for the world, you know?

But I can’t do that just by being buff and unkillable, though it certainly helps.  I can’t help people just by throwing myself into this metaphorical meat grinder. So I somehow got my hands on something called The Book of Fate, which is the lynchpin to some kind of magic ritual that will make me, if my notes and the translations are correct, an “Agent of Karma”. Apparently the people who devised this thing—over literal millennia, mind you—believed that the universe, reality, everything, whatever, actually wants to be a just place, but it can’t directly intervene in its own self. Like how we can’t actually directly fight our own diseases, we have to trust in our body’s internal systems to deal with them. Anyway, these people believed that the moral arc of the universe actually does bend towards justice, and all this research, experimentation, and sacrifice they did was to give someone the power to actually do what needs done. To make sure good things happen to good people, bad things to bad people, mercy and justice metered out appropriately, all that jazz. Apparently it’s supposed to allow the… user? To develop great supernatural abilities as they act in accordance with “the will of the Universe” or something like that.

That sounds amazing and everything, but a lot of it’s pretty vague on the kind of powers you get or how you’ll even know what constitutes “the will of the Universe”. There are some mentions of being granted extraordinary senses or awareness, but again, vague. I don’t like the idea of playing judge, jury, and executioner… if I have to fight people or things to make things right, I’ll do it, but… just enough to handle the things that are outside of existing systems. I don’t want to make people think that society is obsolete and can’t protect them. I’ll just… you know, handle the things that the normal world isn’t equipped to handle.

God, I hope I don’t have to kill anyone.

Uh, anyway, one thing the research made clear is that I won’t have any difficulty finding trouble, at least. My earlier self wrote about a concept called an “entropy sink”, which is apparently what I’ll become in addition to being an “agent of Karma”. Apparently, by fighting bad shit I’ll be soaking up that entropy, that chaos and evil created by said bad shit, which in turn will make more bad shit tend to happen to me. That sounds miserable, but better it happens to the big strong guy with super-healing than to some poor kid playing in their back yard, right?

I’m not worried about that part. The more good I do, the more bad I find, but the stronger I get. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

So, uh… most of my ‘normal’ work has been automated by this point. My Amalgorithms (note to self, check on the progress on that trademark applications) seem to have been improved a bit recently, so past me wasn’t just focusing on the superhero stuff. They can probably handle any projects that come my way, but I think I’m going to stop putting out so many feelers for now. Might need to start working on the Blaccat project again, though; I may need to take some extra-legal measures sometime in the future, depending on which way this goes. I’m sure there will be times when I need some information that’s not, uh, public.

So I keep finding little hide-aways I apparently carved out of some of the empty spaces in the RV. I’ve found a couple of serious guns, a lot of ammo, and a lot of… pharmaceutical.  I am committing so many felonies just by knowing about this car.  But I apparently also built several, well, let’s call them tools.  Like a suit of low-profile body armor I 3D-printed and wired together.  I have no idea if that works or not and I’m not keen to find out, but the old me’s notes seem sound.  I guess I’ll find out if somebody shoots me and I wind up with a wound full of weird plastic discs.  

I think I’ve said all I need to say.  Most of the ingredients for the Book’s ritual are gathered, and I’ve already rented a cabin out in the middle of nowhere to perform this thing.  Apparently the moon needs to be a waxing crescent for this to work, so I’m going to have to wait a couple weeks to actually perform it, but I’m going to get everything set up in the meantime.  The only thing I really have reservations about is that the ritual needs a ‘focus’, and it apparently has to be something with great emotional significance to me.  The obvious answer is Mr. Nex, but… I don’t know if the focus survives the process. All the other ingredients get used up, apparently, but nothing says anything about the focus… do you think it’s what he’d want?  If he was actually alive and knew all he would know about me, having been by my side my entire life?  God, listen to me.  I’m 27 years old and I’m having a crisis over a stuffed giraffe.  But… I guess he wouldn’t be of great emotional significance if the thought of giving him up was easy.  I’ll either figure something out or suck it up.  There are greater things at stake here than my feelings.

“Fffffuck me.”

Evan really hoped he wasn’t falling into a pattern of sudden switches between consciousness and unconsciousness. It couldn’t be good for his brain. Speaking of...

He reached back and patted his head where it’d gotten intimate with the counter. There was some blood matted in his hair, but aside from that…

Evan sat up and turned around. There was a bit of blood on the counter, and some on the carpet where he’d been lying. But beyond a slight tenderness where his fingers touched the spot, there was no pain—and certainly no wound. How long…?

Evan pulled himself up, noticing how oddly easy it felt despite having very recently donkey-punched himself by proxy. The video was still going, but past-Evan had somehow unstrapped himself from the machine and was in the process of stumbling towards the camera. Before the screen went blank, Evan noticed the total length of the video. In comparison to what it had been when he’d toppled over, less than five minutes had passed.

In less than three minutes he’d almost completely healed from a potentially moderately-serious head injury. Not only that, assuming there hadn’t been any post-editing, his previous self had recovered enough from having his brain cored out to be able to free himself from a torture device, walk no worse than a six-drink-deep drunk, and manipulate electronics at least as well as a five-year-old.  How much damage could he sustain and still function? Was there a limit? Could he even die?

Introspection provided no answers, and Evan suddenly found himself very uninterested in the question. Right now, all he wanted to do was take a shower. Maybe that would help put things in perspective. Plus, it was after midnight; if he was going to seriously consider DIY-ing himself into a superhero, he’d do it best after a good night’s sleep. There was also the little matter of the blood in his hair, but that barely registered as a concern in the face of everything else.

His bedroom door was littered with post-it notes and taped-up signs demanding he watch the video on the laptop. He felt a slight tinge of resentment for the earlier version of himself. Sure, he’d gotten the point across, but for God’s sake, there was such a thing as going overboard! Evan ripped off a handful of the notes and crumpled them up as he pushed the door open.

He groaned. The bedroom was almost unrecognizable. About the only thing familiar was his computer, which had been moved to a corner of the room and rearranged on an apparently homemade shelf-slash-desk-slash-whatever. What surface wasn’t occupied by his keyboard and mouse was filled with pieces of machinery and small piles of electronic components.   He’d mounted his three monitors directly to the wall, apparently to save space; in addition, two flatscreen TVs, dated and obviously secondhand, hung on opposite sides of the corner of the room.  So many papers, pictures, and maps were stuck to the walls that the cables connecting the myriad electronics were completely obscured. Had he really gone full tinfoil-hat? Evan groaned as he noticed colored pins and threads weaving an intricate web between the numerous pieces of media. Yep. He’d gone full whacko. If there were any actual, legitimate connections there, the connections had been lost when he’d rebooted his brain.

God, he was getting tired of putting off seeking answers. The temptation to dive into all this nonsense and sort through it was almost overwhelming. But he knew if he sat down and started digging through everything he’d be there for days and wouldn’t get anything else done. He looked around again and actually heard himself growl when he realized his bed was gone. His mind went to the bundled thing on the roof of the RV. Great. He’d uprooted everything to make room for his craziness. There was something in the space where the bed had sat, but it was covered in books, binders, and cast-off clothing.

He’d bought a Bowflex and stashed his bed to make room for it. Had he done this after he’d drilled a hole in his head? It seemed like the kind of thing a guy missing part of his brain would do. He peered back out of the door and saw that the loft at the front of the vehicle had been set up into a sort of mini-bedroom, complete with a long, flat dresser. Well, that made some kind of sense, at least.  

Grumbling to himself about nothing specific, Evan hauled himself up to the loft to inspect what he was certain was a cluttered, hideous bolt-hole in his own damn home.  He was pre-emptively sighing as he pulled himself over the edge, but never quite finished it.  

“Oh.”

Another pleasant surprise. He’d actually set up a nice little room there.  The mattress was very flat but looked fancy, like the kind podcasts were sponsored by. The mattress was topped with neatly folded sheets, an understated but tasteful light gray comforter, and surprisingly plush pillows. A legless nightstand nearby held a small lamp, a bottle of water, and a notepad and pencil, all arranged very deliberately. A small pile of books of varying sizes sat neatly by the mattress, and a small adjustable shelf affixed to the wall held another laptop.  Across from the mattress, a small flatscreen TV hung on the wall, wrapping the whole scene up in a nicely cozy domestic package.

All in all, he was impressed. It was a quaint little living space cultivated out of what he’d formerly dismissed as a throw-away attic. He was a little miffed that the price had been his actual bedroom, but of all the things to begrudge his former self for, this was pretty low on the list. He hauled himself up and crawled to the dresser.  As he opened the drawers, he realized how strange it was to experience his own idiosyncrasies from the outside.  Each pair of socks was neatly knotted together, his boxers were folded perfectly square and sorted by color and pattern; it put him in mind of an adorably eccentric little old man, probably a watchmaker.  That seemed like the kind of person who’d fold his clothes with a t-square and index them.  The thought made Evan smile, but the wholesomeness of the image faded somewhat when he found himself thinking that guys like that usually wound up being serial killers.

Fresh clothes acquired, Evan hopped down and headed to the bathroom. It had been a hell of a thing to find an RV with a bathroom that wasn’t smaller than the average coat closet, but he’d scrounged around until he’d found a Class C model—the one with the bathroom you change clothes in without having to stand with one foot in the toilet.  He had never regretted the extra effort and cost.

He stood in the center of the bathroom for a moment, steeling himself. It was time to rip the band-aid off, figuratively and literally. He stepped up the mirror and stared himself in the eyes.

He could almost see his thoughts reflected in the blue of his irises. Did he really want to do this? Not this whole thing, but this, specifically. If he could heal from practically anything but still needed to have his face under wraps, it must be really bad. Maybe he could just wear a mask the rest of his life, never knowing what he actually looked like. Avoid the ugly truth.

Even while he was thinking it, he knew how ridiculous that idea was. The chaos of the past few hours was stirring up a lot of generalized anxiety that was sending his mind strange places. Drilling a hole in his brain less than a week ago probably hadn’t helped on that front, either.

Time to start that journey of a thousand miles, I guess.

He tied back his hair, took a deep breath, and started to peel the gauze away. Adhesives caught on small hairs, tender skin grumpily sent his brain pangs of pain as it was uncovered. The air on the uncovered skin felt alien, as if it was only touching his skin very reluctantly. Evan’s leg was shaking involuntarily by the time the last bandage landed in the trash can, and he had to take a few deep breaths before he finally raised his gaze to the mirror again.

“……fuck.”

His previous self hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests; if anything, he’d been understating the situation. He’d be lucky if he didn’t make kids cry when they saw him.

His left cheek definitely had the worst of it. His in-between-brown-red-tan skin—which he supposed could be called “ruddy”, but he liked to refer to himself as “ethnically ambiguous”—was covered in divots and spots from his mis-angled jawline up to just below his left eye. Evan slowly ran his fingers over his mottled skin, marveling at the variation between the individual pits, bumps, and gashes. There were actual small chunks of face missing. The texture of the skin was almost smooth to the touch but a little bit sticky, like the paint of an old house, complete with uneven coverage and bumps of buildup. Evan found that the skin didn’t hurt to the touch, but it also didn’t feel how skin was supposed to feel; his fingers didn’t immediately recognize it as skin, and the touch of his own fingers on his cheek came through muted and distorted, like the sensation was on a weak, distant signal. Christ. Was it a burn? No, it looked like he’d been too close to an explosion, all chopped up like that. Was it an accident or an attack?

Shit. It didn’t stop on his face, either. It had been hidden by his hair, but now that it was pulled back he could see that the pitting and gashes continued upwards along the side of his head. Pieces of his left ear were gone. Everything behind the top of the ear was a chewed-up mess. His lobe was still there, but not for lack of trying; a jagged tear ran from the back halfway to the front. It was like somebody had bitten the top of the ear off, then grabbed the lobe and tried to just yank it off.

After a few moments of staring at his ragged ear, Evan whipped his head around to check the other one. He sighed with relief as he saw it was intact, but the new angle brought the right side of his face into view. It wasn’t as bad as his left, but, unfortunately, his left side had originally been his ‘good side’; two long, curving scars, the result of an unfortunate incident with a turkey vulture during his teenage years, ran up the right side of his neck and peeked over his jaw about an inch up his cheek. Previously, that had been the extent of the damage to that cheek.

But now, in addition to a ton of tiny scratches and a few more small divots, his right cheek was taken up by a wide starburst-shaped scar that trailed off to a line and crossed his crooked nose like the tail of a comet, ending somewhere among the mess on his left cheek. It even looked like somebody’d tried to stitch it closed—upon closer inspection, the edge of the scar looked almost serrated. Clearly the stitches hadn’t held. He couldn’t imagine how much any individual part of that must have hurt.

His big, broad forehead was relatively unscathed save for a few “normal” scars, though a tiny triangular chunk of the far edge of his left eyebrow seemed to have left for greener pastures. After everything else, it was almost jarring how un-damaged he was above the eyes. Maybe he’d been wearing a helmet or something when whatever mutilated him happened. If it was just one incident.

Well, shit.  He wasn’t quite the most mangled person he’d ever seen, but…

He felt tears start to well in his eyes as his fingers gripped the edge of the sink.  It wasn’t fair.  He’d been handsome, if a bit unusually so, before.  Not that he’d taken advantage of it, but… to suddenly wake up to a face that was no longer his was frightening.  He was hideous.  Hell, he was almost a monster.

Evan’s heart pounded louder and louder as he fought back tears. There was no distinction between anger, sadness, and fear any more. A synesthetic mass of emotions stormed around his brain, crushing all his thoughts under the weight of pure mental chaos. He started to scream, a hoarse wail that pitched up gradually to a roar of insane fury as his whole body began to quake violently. He stared his mutilated reflection dead in the eyes as he continued to scream, a primordial, hateful rejection of the thing he saw before him. When he ran out of breath, he screamed between gasps; short, sharp shouts that consumed all the air in his lungs with each exclamation. He didn’t know how long he was screaming before something made a loud crack and came loose in his right hand.

Evan’s scream slowly trailed off as he looked down at the object in his fist. It was piece of the sink. In his rage, he’d gripped the countertop surface so hard that a palm-sized chunk of stone had broken off.

“What a cheap piece of…” Evan started to say, but then stopped. He’d dropped a hammer on the sink months ago and it hadn’t even chipped the surface. It didn’t damage easily. So what…

Evan’s eyes fell on his hand again. He’d always had huge hands, which stuck out on his lean, lanky arms like the end of a rake. Except his arm wasn’t lanky any more. He couldn’t pick out the bones in his wrist like he remembered. In fact, there was a lot more wrist than he remembered, circumference-wise.  Ditto with his forearm (more scars there, too…), and his elbow was similarly magnified.  And above that…

“JESUS CHRIST.”

Evan had never been a small guy.  Even as a kid he’d been tall and wiry, with limbs that seemed a size or two too long for his torso.  He’d hit six feet tall before he’d hit his 14th birthday.  In high school, he’d been involved in a lot of sports, but always ones where being dexterous and fast were to his advantage.  Even when he’d begun boxing he’d focused more on using his reach and stamina than developing sheer stopping power.  After watching his two older siblings become hulking behemoths of human beings, he was aware that his family had the potential to be extraordinarily beefy, but he’d tried to stick to keeping himself slim and trim.

Clearly, something in the missing months had made him reconsider his stance on the issue.  If his bicep was less than 24” around he’d be shocked.   He raised his hand to shoulder height, clenched it into a fist, and curled it backwards.

“God damn, son!”  Evan watched his own muscle bulge and shrink several times over, a grin slowly creeping over his face.  Okay, yeah, he could work with this.  That’d do just fine.  

Like a kid on Christmas tearing into the biggest present under the tree, Evan yanked his shirt off over his head with violent enthusiasm.  Underneath, he was still wearing that strange undershirt.  

“Weird sequin armor. Later,” he muttered, dragging the strange garment off and tossing it into a corner where it settled with a soft slithering sound.  Evan’s jaw dropped as he took in his bare torso.  Wide-eyed and still staring downwards, he sidestepped his way back in front of the mirror. His gaze slowly raised to the mirror again, and he realized his horrifying face was split into a massive grin. Even with his disfigurement, his sheer excitement was clearly evident. He took a deep breath, held it for a second, and then yelled again.

“Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaa-uhhhhh, BABY!”

He didn’t have a ton in the way of resting definition, but the bulk of muscle was undeniable. Evan spent a few moments flexing his arms and shoulders, marveling how his skin shifted and bulged in novel and fascinating ways. He was at least a foot broader at the shoulder than he remembered, and that was just the start of it.

His chest was borderline absurd. Like his shoulders, it had broadened, thickened, and rounded. Evan gingerly poked at his bulging pectorals. Firm, but not rock-hard. Enough softness to still feel like a person instead of an object, but still extremely supple. He felt his cheeks flush.

He had boobs.

But… like, good guy-boobs? That was a thing, right? Some girls liked that. Some guys, too, he thought, feeling his cheeks burning a little hotter as some cobwebs were dusted away from that particular corner of his libido.

He knew he was fully blushing now, but a strange and weirdly irresitable notion was punching through the fog of embarrassment. Fuck it, he was alone. Who was going to see?

Evan put his hands under his pecs, lifted, and pushed them together, leaning forward and pursing his lips at his reflection. He winked at himself and made a kissing sound, then burst out laughing. He had cleavage! Almost four inches of it!

Evan flopped down on the toilet lid, giggling madly to himself. “I guess the big tits gene doesn’t just affect the women in the family,” he managed to chuckle, hefting ‘the boys’ again. He looked almost hilariously sexualized. In addition to his new bustiness, he was still sporting nipple piercings and belly button ring—remnants of teenage rebellion that he’d kept as a cautionary tale to himself against impulsive decisions. The silver spikes and brass ring somehow looked more at home on his new body; when he’d been scrawny they’d made him look like he was trying to audition for a ‘Suicide Girls’ knock-off. If only he’d had paler skin and a heroin addiction he could probably have made a lot of money with a webcam. Now he looked like he could be on the cover of a harlequin romance—albeit one with a lot of airbrushing and somebody else’s head imposed on his body.

So he’d beefed up in anticipation of… whatever he could call whatever he was about to undertake. That explained the exercise equipment, as well as several containers of various supplement powders he’d come across while checking on his food situation.

Now that he’d finished with his giggle fit over his tits, Evan was a little surprised by how long it’d taken him to notice how much his body had changed. Everything still moved the way he remembered; he still felt very light on his feet, despite his new bulk. Standing in front of the mirror again, he bent from side to side at the waist, testing his flexibility.  Amazingly, he felt limber as ever. Apparently past Evan had done this bulking up thing right; despite the fact that his abdomen and obliques seemed to have been replaced with rock-solid slabs of beef, he was still able to easily bend down and touch his toes. While he was down there, he noticed that he hadn’t skipped the proverbial leg day, either—that, or he’d had a butterball turkey implanted into each thigh.

So… arms and shoulders three times bigger, a jaw-dropping rack, less “abs” and more “slab”, skull-crushing thighs and an amateur slasher movie face.  He looked weird. But… he found himself liking it more the more he thought about it.  He could do something about the face, or make it work for him.  Make looking like a brute work.  Be a fashion pioneer.  Figure something out.  

Now that his giddiness had died down a bit, Evan started looking himself over for other damage.  The video had said he’d have a massive wound on his chest, but he hadn’t even noticed it at first. There was, indeed, a large discoloration a few inches under his left nipple, reaching around under his arm and around to his back, but it looked more like a giant birthmark than a fatal axe wound. Why was it so faint?  Hell, the purple spot on his solar plexis, a sort of permanent bruise from a childhood injury, stood out more than it. His body was dotted with other, smaller scars that stood out much more; a few near his navel were definitely bullet wounds, and judging from the jagged pale lines above his right hip, a bear had tried to steal his kidney.  Regardless of their size, wounds that could cause scars that severe should have been still hurting him bit, even after external healing.  But he found that, aside from the scars, it was as if those injuries never happened.  No sign of any internal injury.  He felt extremely healthy, and he was grateful for it, but it wasn’t how that worked, and that started to eat at him.

The rules had changed and he had virtually no data on how any of it worked. He was no longer afraid, angry, or sad about his situation. Now he was annoyed. How was he supposed to go about this intelligently with only anecdotal evidence? The obvious answer was to start testing the properties of his healing, but what if there were strange rules?  Did he have a personal kryptonite? What if he cut himself, and it turned out the healing didn’t work because of what the blade was made of, and he got an infection and died? What if there was a limited number of times he could heal? Was it like an extra life system?

Evan stepped back up the mirror again, now glowering at his reflection. Now that he wasn’t as shocked by his own appearance, maybe he could figure something out in the patterns of the scars. Some kind of clue in the type of injuries or something. Just a starting point. Some tiny little verifiable speck of data he could cling to like a drowning man.

Before any answers surfaced from his ruined reflection, Evan noticed something sticking out from behind the mirror. The corner of a yellow piece of paper was closed in the medicine cabinet door.  He tugged it out and recognized his own handwriting again.  

Thought you might need these.

Briefly puzzled, Evan pulled open the medicine cabinet.  There, tucked amongst bottles of an alarming variety of supplements, was an old ‘Altoids’ tin, slightly dented and faded with age.  As he picked it up, a familiar skunky smell wafted into his nostrils. He snorted with laughter as he flicked the tin open and pulled out three meticulously-rolled joints and his favorite lighter.   After a second’s thought, he stuck all three between his lips and flicked the lighter open.

“Monsters exist.”

It was, by all means, a useless statement.  It sounded stupid.  It sounded like something a little kid telling a ghost story would say, or something one of those wannabe Banksy types would spraypaint on the side of a police station or something.  But, nonetheless, an electric shiver, so potent that it made his breath catch in his throat, ran through his body.  

Because it was him saying it to himself.  He knew his own tells, his own voice… he was being sincere. While it was possible this was all a trick, that password…

“I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense.  You’ll probably eventually notice some big scars on your back. Those are from a wendigo.  Or is it pronounced when-dee-go? I don’t know, not the point.  Superhumanly strong cannibalistic former humans.  Tough, but they still die if you cut their heads off. Try not to freak out when you see the skull in the bedroom.”

“WHAT.”

“So yeah, there’s all kinds of really bad things out there.  I’ve kept notes.  But there’s also so many good things!”  Old Evan’s eyes lit up and he scooted forward on the chair.  “New things we couldn’t have imagined!  Things outside of physics!  New sciences!  Actual, real magic!  I saw a guy actually jump over a building! Superpowers exist! And here’s the best part: I’ve—shit, we’ve—got one!”

Evan felt his face slacken into an expression of incredulous confusion as the recorded Evan stood up and walked towards the camera. His form loomed over it and ate up most of the frame, but he held the fingertip of his right hand up in front of the lens.

“Watch this.”

From offscreen, a small knife appeared and Evan watched himself drag the blade across his own fingertip. There was an irritated-sounding hiss of discomfort—Jesus, he was cutting deep! His past self shook out his hand, then held up the wounded digit to the camera.

Evan covered his mouth in shock as he realized how bad the cut was. The other him’s bone was visible through the pooling blood. It would require stitches, at least! But…

He looked down at his own, present-time finger. Aside from familiar little cuts, calluses, and blemishes that had been there for years, there was no sign that anything was amiss. Even if this happened months ago, there would still be a scar from it, surely! But there was nothing new.

“Look, here it goes.”

His attention was drawn back to the screen by his own voice. The gashed finger was still front and center, but something was different.

The blood was barely flowing any more. The bone wasn’t visible. As Evan watched, the wound began to visibly narrow, the skin creeping along the edge of the cut like a time-lapse video of lichen growing on a rock. When the opposite edges of the cut grew closer, raw pink skin grew across the gap. Evan swore he could see fibers of skin reach across and connect to the other side. In less than a minute, all that was left of a pretty serious self-inflicted wound was some slightly discolored skin and a scab that looked like it was days old.

“I don’t know why I’m like this, but I don’t think it’s something new,” Old Evan said, sitting back in the chair and idly picking at the skin. “Remember all the times we got hurt and it didn’t seem as bad as it should have been? Getting gored and stomped on by that bull? Getting lost in the woods and finding our way out with that broken leg? The cancer surgery? All the shit Mary did to us? We heal! We heal fast! And from a lot of stuff, too…”

Vid-Evan paused, sounding slightly troubled. “Look, I’m not sure how strong this is yet, but… okay, if you haven’t yet, you’re going to notice there’s a gigantic, awful-looking scar right here on the left side of your…our…dammit, these tenses are fucking me up. Here.” He ran his fingers along his left side, a few inches below his pectoral… right where the mangled hoodie had been repaired.  “I can’t go into all the details, but someone I was hanging out with got…enchanted, mind controlled, something like that.  It didn’t work on me for some reason, but I’d probably have been better off if it did, because he came after me.  And he was a HUGE guy, plus he had superhuman strength, so... I didn’t stand much of a chance.  After he beat me down, he took this huge ax he carried around and…” The recording pantomimed an overhand swing.  “If I hadn’t rolled he’d have split me in half.  As it was, the cut stopped just a couple inches from my spine. Organs pulped, bones shattered… I was out in seconds.  I woke up about an hour later and, well, it still hurt and my shirt was ruined, and I got a MASSIVE scar from it, but…” he spread his hands in front of him.  “I was alive.  Breathing, blood pumping, the whole nine yards.  And that’s not all.  I’ve been shot a few times, stabbed, clawed, punched by things a lot stronger than people… it heals in less than a day.  I don’t know why some of them leave scars and some don’t, but… well, let’s just say we’re not gonna win any beauty pageants.  Sorry.”

 The image on the screen raised his hand to his cheek, and Evan suddenly felt a deep sadness coming from his doppelganger.  He could see something sparkling in his own blue eyes, and realized it was the backlight reflecting off his tears.  The recording took a deep, shaky breath, and continued.

 “Look, I have to get to the point.  There’s a lot of bad shit out there, but there’s a lot of good, too, and I want to be a part of it.  With all the things we know, the things we know how to do… with the right tools, we could really make a difference.  Save people from things they can’t protect themselves from.  But don’t just hunt things down if they’re not hurting anyone. Everything’s got a right to exist as long as they don’t impede on that right of others, right? And go out and make the world better, don’t just fight, y’know?  We’ve always had big ideas.  We’ve got money, we know how to fight.  And we were bored, just tooling around staying out of trouble.  Let’s put all our skills and talents to good use, yeah?  Um…”  

 Film-Evan’s gaze drifted away from the camera.  He pursed his lips and shifted his jaw, twisting his expression as he seemed to struggle with what to say next.   After a few seconds of silence, he reached behind himself and pulled something out of the back pocket of his pants.  He stared down at it for a few moments, then held it up.

“Just being able to heal fast won’t be enough to make a difference, though.  I’ve built some weapons and gathered supplies—there’s an inventory on this computer—but this is the key to us really making this whole thing work.”  

It was a small, worn-looking book, bound in faded leather with a cover decorated with several small inset beads.  It wasn’t much bigger than the average paperback novel and a little over an inch thick, and some of the pages were clearly made of different materials than others.  It had a distinctly cobbled-together look, but the man on the screen ran his fingers over the cover with something resembling reverence.  

“This thing’s had a lot of names, but in more recent times it’s referred to as the Book of Fate.  Kinda cliché, I know, but it’s the real deal.  This thing is both the instruction manual and a key reagent for a magical ritual that’s been in development for centuries.  No, make that millennia.  And, like, tons of cultures.  Most of this thing isn’t in English.  Some of it is later translations, but… anyway, a whole lot of people have been working on this thing for a very long time, but it’s never actually been cast.  Performed. Whatever.

“But what this thing is intended to do, as far as I’ve been able to decipher, is to give the, uh, ‘target’ probably isn’t the right word, but you get what I mean, right?  The target of the ritual.  It’s supposed to give them the ability to develop their own… powerset?  God, it feels weird to use that term to refer to a real thing, but that’s the gist of it.  It’s a bit vague on how, but… well, I always wanted to be the first one to try to do something, didn’t I?  We? Fuck.

“Anyway, I don’t have time to explain everything here, but I’ve got tons of notes and personal research stashed away on this computer, and there’s backups in the filing cabinet in the bedroom if something happens. I’ve gathered most of the ingredients for the ritual, and I’ve got all the steps written down.  Do it.  Go through with it.  And after that, well, don’t worry.  Trouble will find you.

“So why am I telling you this instead of you just remembering it? Well, I can’t go into any details beyond I learned something literally dangerous.  Just me having the knowledge in my head has the potential to make something very bad happen.  So I have to get rid of it.”

The recorded Evan stood up and pulled the cloth off the chair.  The chair was huge, made of dark wood, and clearly very heavy. The angle of the lens cut off the bottom of the legs, but Evan thought he could see angle brackets anchoring the bulky thing to the floor. There were straps, made of leather even more aged and ragged than the book’s cover, on the arms and legs of the chair. Attached to the top was a strange colander-shaped device studded with wires, lights, and glass tubes filled with several colors of liquid. Topping it off was what seemed to be the innards of a power drill, tipped with a strangely gleaming bit and angled to point straight down towards the top of the wearer’s head.

Evan suddenly felt a wave of nausea as the twice forces of confusion and understanding smashed into each other in his brain. He suddenly knew what he was about to witness. He realized why his head was so empty. He knew the path he’d set himself on and was, in a sort of giddy, manic way, excited about what he’d told himself. He knew everything he needed to know. But he couldn’t stop watching. He didn’t even realize he’d been squeezing Mr. Nex like a stress ball until his knuckles cracked from the force. He could hear himself on the recording: “blah blah combination of drugs and corrosive chemicals blah blah specially coated enchanted drill bit blah blah many calculations blah lots of expert help blah blah prevent regenerating brain tissue from retaining recent memories blah blah reset pattern of consciousness upon completion of healing process blah”, but Evan was focusing on very gently setting Mr. Nex out of his arm’s reach. If what he thought was coming was indeed coming, he was worried that he might accidentally pulp the stuffed giraffe between his fingers.

After setting his old friend well out of reach on the passenger’s seat, Evan sat back down in the kitchen just as his recorded self finished strapping himself to the awful machine. There was a small remote control clenched in the shaking fingers of his left hand, and his head had been fixed in place by several thick straps.  He locked eyes with the camera again.  

“I’ve been wondering if this counts as me actually dying, since this portion of my consciousness won’t be sustained.  I honestly haven’t come to an answer, but…” Decisively, he thumbed the button.  The drill began to whir.  Somewhere off-camera, something large and volatile crackled to life.  “Fortune favors the bold!” The vials on the helmet started to bubble and drain.  Already shaking slightly from the electric charge, Film-Evan reached out with his tongue and pulled a block of wood on a string between his teeth.  Evan watched his own eyes bulge and start to roll wildly. The drill had hit bone.  

Since his head was strapped in place and largely obscured by the helmet and bandages, there wasn’t much to watch.  The sound was the bad part.  The former Evan was screaming as the bit ground noisily through his skull, the gag doing little to muffle the sound.  The machinery, the screaming, the wet crunching of pulverizing bone—it all blended together into a nightmarish vomit of noise, and Evan realized he was screaming, too, a low, guttural scream, one of low volume and pitch but utterly panicked intensity.

 The background noise suddenly stopped and Evan found his scream lowering to a drawn-out groan. His digital counterpart had stopped screaming and the drill had gone silent; as he watched, the machine slowly withdrew the bit, dripping with blood and pink-gray pulp, from his own ruined skull. The other him groaned softly and spit out the gag, his eyes struggling to focus on the camera. Though blood was leaking from his mouth, he managed to grin. His lips trembling, he took a breath and slurred weakly:

“It’ll be worth it. We’re going to make a real difference. We’ll be a force to be reckoned with, I just know it. I believe in myself. I believe in you.”

He’d just taken another breath, perhaps to try to continue his inspiring farewell, but suddenly the lights on the helmet lit up and there was a soft sound of liquid sloshing. A split second of a sharp hissing was audible, then old-Evan shrieked as wisps of smoke began to rise from the top of this head. The scream was so sudden, so shrill, so agonized, and so ear-piercingly loud that it only lasted for a couple seconds before a hideous gurgling-tearing noise preceded the noise lowering to a hoarse wail.

Despite what he’d seen thus far, the scream took Evan by surprise. He involuntarily jerked backwards, the chair’s legs caught, and he toppled over backwards. Luckily, the corner of the kitchen counter was waiting to break his fall, and graciously did so with a tap to the back of the head. Pain surged from the impact, but was rapidly overtaken by surging, suffocating darkness.

Just before it all went black, Evan found himself thinking:

Evan was awakened by a rapping on the door and muffled but obviously irritated questions.  He must’ve looked a truly sorry sight, as the flushed-faced security guard lost some of his bluster when Evan opened the door and hesitantly told Evan that he couldn’t stay parked in the lot all night and that could he please move on down to the campground a few miles up the road, if y’d be so kind.

Evan stared at the heavyset man for a long moment, then shook himself.  “Oh, crap, yeah.  Sorry, man. Lost track of the time.  Give me just a couple minutes and I’ll be out of your hair.”  Shit.  It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed the man was bald, but the words had started to leave his mouth before the ramifications the idiom hit him.  To his relief, the guard didn’t seem to make the connection and bid Evan a good night.

Once the guard had puttered off back to the golf cart that served as his ‘patrol car’, Evan stepped outside and re-examined his own vehicle.  Due to the lack of lighting, he couldn’t make out anything particularly expensive-looking on the RV, though he did notice that there were several large objects strapped to the roof.  That didn’t worry him much; at worst, he’d probably gone to a garage sale or something while drunk and had bought something embarrassingly bulky and expensive that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away.

At the back of the RV was another piece of comforting familiarity: his car.  Evan hardly ever drove it, but the powder-blue ’97 Beetle came in handy every now and then when he wanted to go somewhere without taking his entire house with him.  It appeared to be in good shape, though its interior was partially full of something covered by a sheet.  Evan took a few minutes to poke around in the back seat and found that the car was mostly full of books.  Encyclopedias, cookbooks, do-it-yourself books on nearly every topic he could imagine… he had a small library in there.  A well-used one, too, from the look of it: hardly a book wasn’t sprouting with bookmarks and tiny sticky notes bearing near-microscopic writing.  

Fighting against his own curiosity, Evan closed the door and moved back to the trunk.  He expected—perhaps even hoped for—more of the same, but when he unlocked the trunk and went to open it, he felt slight resistance.  He hesitated, then tugged again.  The door wasn’t stuck; instead, it felt like it was weighed down.  Slowly, and with the possibility of car bombs suddenly a very big concern in his mind, Evan carefully lifted the trunk open.  

As he did so, something unfolded from the bottom of the lid.  Evan flung himself to the side in anticipation of some kind of swinging blade or spring-loaded arrow, then immediately became very grateful for the parking lot’s poor lighting.  Hopefully that would keep people from noticing him lurching around like a shitfaced ninja.  

What swung out of the trunk was a series of shelves, attached to trunk lid.  More confused than anything at this point, Evan began to fiddle with the new addition until he unfolded it completely and discovered that someone, presumably him, had built a small but surprisingly high-utility workbench out of the trunk of his friggin’ Volkswagen.  The absurdity of it all momentarily stunned him.  The biggest surface was made out of smooth, dense metal that seemed slightly scorched, and he realized that there was a small portable welder tucked into the side of the trunk alongside numerous other tools.

“Nope.  I will deal with this later.”

After a few false starts, he managed to fold the table back into the trunk.  He found himself hoping that he had built the setup himself, because it was damn impressive and he would be very proud of that.  Hopefully he’d kept plans; he was already brainstorming improvements as he locked up the Bug and went back inside.

God, it was after ten! It’d been somewhere in the early afternoon when he’d “woke up”, and he’d only been up for about an hour before he’d passed out on the couch.  Sometime during that period he’d shrugged out of the frankenhoodie and unstrapped the gun, which meant he’d been walking around outside in a very obviously used Kevlar vest like some kind of lunatic. Again, thank God it was dark out.

Evan shrugged his way out of the vest and dropped it on the couch.  He’d been wearing a cheap plain t-shirt—again, gray—underneath, but under that was something strange.  Reaching under his shirt, his hand met what felt like scales.  He was wearing a second piece of armor underneath everything.  

Jesus Christ.  What did he need so much protection from?  Where’d he get this?  

More questions that would have to wait.  He had it on for a reason, so until he had answers, it would stay on.  Anyway, the armor was actually pretty comfortable; snug but smooth and cool to the touch.  He wondered if it could be homemade, and if so, had he made it?  It was nice that he was encountering some interesting and harmless mysteries to go along with the all the horrifying and confusing ones.

Time to shelve the mysteries, time to move. Settling into the driver’s seat was like sliding on an old shoe. The slight resistance of the cushions as his weight compressed them, the contours worn into them by countless consecutive hours of trying, and even the faint smell of himself infused into the seat made Evan feel at home. The strong, sharp click of the seatbelt and the low grumble of the slightly-moody engine were like music to his ears, and when he pulled out of the parking lot, it felt like he was sinking into a warm bath.

Evan had come to love driving.  It was almost meditative.  When he was behind the wheel, all his responsibilities were temporarily shelved. All that mattered, all that anyone could expect of him, was to get to his destination in a timely manner.  It meant that he had time to think about whatever he wanted to, but the great thing was that he didn’t have to, which was what he was looking forward to now. After all, if he’d forgotten nearly three months’ worth of time, any music that would have come out during that time would be completely new to him!  “Satellite radio, do your stuff.”

His phone was broken, but Evan could have fished out his spare GPS unit or looked up directions on one of the many computers he knew were around the vehicle. He didn’t. Part of him was afraid of what he’d find if he started digging around, and another part just wanted an excuse to drive aimlessly in peace. He’d been driving for about an hour and a half before he decided it was time to come back to reality.  

Another cookie-cutter campground, another temporary spot of stability. There had been dozens like it beforehand, and probably more in the missing months. The details of it were basically inconsequential. He paid and hooked up the RV, used the bathroom, and checked the fridge. At least with whatever he’d been doing in the past three months he’d found time to make sure he had plenty of beer.

The password is the date. Evan rolled his eyes at his own attempt at being cryptic. Sure, he knew what he—previous him—meant, but it was somehow weirdly embarrassing. He got the message, though. When a blank-faced profile appeared on the login screen, he typed in a few combinations before he found the one that worked: 081808. That date had a special significance to him, but very few people would attribute the same significance to it. Not a fun date, but one he wouldn’t forget. 

Don’t dwell on it. Go forward. 

The laptop seemed to be the computer equivalent of a burner phone. It didn’t even have a wireless card. Once the OS booted up, Evan found the backgroundless desktop was stuffed with icons. Nearly all of them were basic text files with names like “DON’T CLICK ON ANYTHING UNTIL YOU WATCH THE VIDEO” and “EVAN—WATCH THE VIDEO” and “WATCH IT WATCH IT WATCH IT”. It was like a visual representation of the thought process of a very enthusiastic golden retriever. In the middle of the screen was a video file simply labeled “An Explanation”. It was so subdued compared to the massive clutter of hysterical type-screaming text files that he glanced over it at first. The mouse cursor hovered over the video for a second, but then, unable to resist being a smartass, even to himself, Evan clicked on the “DON’T CLICK ON ANYTHING” text file. Seconds later he burst out laughing after reading the contents: “WHAT DID I FUCKING SAY, SHITHEAD? STOP BEING A DICK.”

“Okay, okay, don’t have a stroke,” Evan chuckled to himself, clicking the video. He checked the volume as the video player loaded, then sat back and watched.

 The video started with a few second of blackness, then there was a clicking and shifting sound as the lens cap was removed. Evan found himself staring at his own torso as the recorded version of himself adjusted the camera. As he stepped back, more of the scene became visible. It was a barn or shed of some kind; the walls were wooden and had some obvious age to them, but that might have been the light. The scene was lit from behind the camera and either the doors were all closed or it was night, because outside of the light the surroundings were draped in shadow. The only significant feature of the room seemed to be a large chair covered in a sheet. Evan watched himself sit down in the chair and marveled at his own appearance. He was dressed much the same way as he’d been when he’d ‘reset’ earlier in the day, including the bandaged face and patchwork hoodie, but he seemed so much bigger than his preconceived notion of himself. He started to feel a bit self-conscious when his earlier self raised his head to face the camera and began to speak.

“My name is Evander Gregory Abrams, and if you’re watching this, you should know that, because you’re me.”  His own voice sounded somehow tinny and crisp at the same time.  It was his normal voice, too; Evan was unusual in that he liked his own voice. Slightly higher pitched than average and quite melodic, it didn’t quite fit his body, but it gave him one hell of a vocal range.  He rubbed at his neck, his throat still sore, and hoped that whatever had happened to make him sound like a lo-fi Tom Waits wasn’t permanent.  The video continued.

“You’re probably pretty confused and maybe a bit scared right now, so let me explain what happened to you and what’s about to happen to me.”  Evan felt a slight chill run through his body at those words. What was he about to see?

“For the past few months, I’ve learned so much about so many things I didn’t even know there were to know about.  It’s amazing.  Life is fascinating.  There’s so much more I want to learn, but… okay, I’m getting ahead of myself.  Look, here’s the bottom line.”  His image took a deep breath, then stared directly into the camera.