Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 4-2

“No,” I say, stopping suddenly and planting my feet. “You won’t go near him.”

I make fists with my hands and crouch and wait for them to make their move. I notice the grip on the baseball bat tighten and the same with the man holding the ax. I won’t let them get to Oscar, the only man I considered to be a father-figure. I’ll do anything to protect him, including sacrifice my life. But if I’m going to die, I’m taking these two with me.

The ax man lunges at me and swings at my head. I see his shoulder muscles twitch and I’m dodging it before it’s even halfway near me and then watch the blade pass before my eyes and see the reflection of the guy with the baseball bat in its shiny metal. The edge misses me by an inch, but I’m confident I could have easily made it miss by a foot. I hear the blade as it swooshes by me, separating the air in a dreamlike way. He swings again and again, and I dodge backward and avoid the ax until I’m standing cornered at the side wall of my living room. I’m in awe of myself, and I’m trying to understand how I’m doing this, and know it’s because of the gray box that seared me nearly to death. But how? He swings again. I swat at it in the same direction it’s going, and it flies out of the Russian’s hands. He looks at me dumbfounded and then draws his pistol out of his waist. It has a silencer. Suddenly, the man with the baseball bat is swinging. I clumsily trip backward over my side table and get to my feet just in time to miss a baseball bat to my skull. My back is now to the window that overlooks the alley below. I have nowhere to run as the baseball bat swings toward my chest. I raise my hands to protect myself, and the rest happens so slowly: the angry grimace on his face, the bat snapping upon impact against my arms, me falling out of the window behind me, and the shards of glass that fall with me reflecting a mix of starlight from outside and incandescent light from my living room. I focus on one large shard that’s hooked like a talon that falls at the same pace as me, down story after story toward the hard cement of the alley below, the images inside it changing beautifully as it captures and fragments the different levels of my brick building.

The impact from the bat should have broken my arms, but they’re not broken. They’re fine. I’m halfway into my descent and am able to focus clearly on the bat man looking out the window to watch my downward progress. He seems confused. I see his left eye twitch as he squints, and I notice for the first time how bushy his eyebrows are. I feel the middle of my back smack into the concrete first, followed soon after by my head and my heels. The impact is tremendous. The cement indents a foot and cracks in a rectangle around me. The sensation in my body is like tiny vibrations, like numbness waking, but with no pain. I stand and look up and feel more alive than at any other time of my life. The bat man says something in Russian and then pulls back into my window so the goon with the gun can look. They talk in more Russian eight floors up, but I can hear and see them as if they’re eight feet away. I don’t know Russian, so I don’t understand what they’re saying, but it’s probably something along the lines of: ‘What the hell?’

I sit down against the brick wall to think. Every bone in my body should have shattered upon the impact to the earth, and instead of a large indentation on the cement in front of me, there should be a mass of dark blood. The gray box had given me these abilities. That’s obvious. The professor had said this was the only way to avenge my brother and save the world, and I had agreed to use it, but just barely, and now what? I no longer had the gray box. I had not destroyed it. Nor had I destroyed the vials that my brother so explicitly mentioned in his message to me from the grave. But now I could fall from buildings. I could get hit by an ax and not be damaged in the slightest. But to what benefit, or what detriment? Did my brother have these same abilities? If so, how did he end up the way I saw him in the morgue?

The professor had undoubtedly saved me. Tengen’s first arm-twisting had been a warning. The second fight had been a bludgeoning. He had meant to kill me. I recalled the pain of his fist hitting my head and how it felt like a steel hammer. I had been on the verge of death. Save the world, the professor had said. Such a statement was too open. What was achievable with this new power? What were the limitations? Pittsburgh had the answers, and I needed to get there as soon as possible.

The two Russians come from around the corner with their guns with silencers drawn. They take one glance at each other as if to say ‘how in the world is he alive?’, and then they fire their guns in my direction. The first two bullets come at me slowly enough for me to get out of the way, but I stick my hand out to catch one because I’m curious about how the impact will feel. It hits the middle of my hand as hard as a styrofoam peanut. After that, they let off a barrage of bullets that would have made Capone proud. Nine bullets head my way. Two lead the pack by several feet, and so beautiful is their path that I step out of the way to watch them pass by my face. I turn towards the rest and catch every single one.

“You shouldn’t have threatened my stepfather,” I say. “He did nothing wrong.”

I throw the seven bullets I caught as hard as I can toward the goon who had once held the ax. One bullet hits him straight in the middle of the forehead, and to my surprise, has enough propulsion to exit out the back of his skull while the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh hit him in the throat, abdomen, thigh, knee, shin, and foot. All the bullets go clean in and out, and the man falls, dead. The other goon fires until his gun is empty. I run toward the bullets and knock all of them out of the way and plow into him and knock him back thirty feet. I felt his bones shatter at impact to such a degree that I think no one could survive. He lies on the ground and already has blood exiting his mouth when I get to him. He struggles to breathe. I can’t believe I did this. I can’t believe I killed two men. I look back at the other Russian who is definitely dead from the bullets and then back down to the man still suffering. Death is close for him. The look in his eyes is disbelieving.

“Sorry,” I say with some sincerity.

He takes his last breath. I look around, and in a millisecond I’m off, running fast away from the scene, getting the hell out of the area because nothing makes sense, and I just killed two guys, and I don’t want to go to jail, and I just have no idea what the hell else to do.

There are very few people awake at this hour, and I know my running could attract unwanted attention, so I turn into an alley and run its length and stop before a metal dumpster where three homeless shepherd-mix dogs are eating out of torn styrofoam containers what I hope is spaghetti leftovers. Their mouths are red around the edges. The leader growls menacingly at me.

“Good puppy-dog,” I say. He lunges at me and snaps his jaw ferociously. I love dogs and feel bad for these three because they’re clearly hungry and without shelter, and I don’t want the big one to lose the other’s respect, so when he lunges for real to attack I let him bite my right forearm. He seems surprised, and lets go almost instantly, and I suddenly wonder if I had hurt him somehow. My skin completely heals itself in a matter of nanoseconds, and the dog backs away. The others follow his lead, one of them whimpering, probably because he didn’t want to leave the food behind.

I sit next to the dumpster. I feel remorse about killing the Russians, but then I remember their threat against my step-dad. They shouldn’t have threatened him. I try to convince myself that I had just rid the world of two terrible human beings, but then I wonder if maybe they had families, and that bothers me to think about. “You didn’t mean to kill them,” I tell myself out loud, but even when I say it I know it’s a lie. I didn’t know my strength, but I wouldn’t have thrown the bullets if I didn’t think they would cause harm. And when I hit the second man, I didn’t have to hit him so hard.

The steel box and the vials inside had given me such strength. I look up at the tall wall of buildings above me and I wonder… can I jump high? Ten feet? More than that? I stand without taking my eyes off the top ridge of the roof. It’s twenty stories high. I get down into a crouch and decide if I’m doing this then I will do it right.

“3-2…1,” I say out loud, and then I push against the ground with as much force as I can muster, and suddenly I’m shooting upward toward the moonlit sky. I look down at the ground and see it get smaller and smaller, and then look at the side of the building and look at the coarseness of a single brick, and then I look up at the quickly approaching ridge of the roof.

“Whoo!” I yell as I soar past the roof and into the night. I look down at the top of the roof and realize what’s next, and then I get worried. In my head, I know I’m 420 feet and 2.7 inches up when my momentum finally slows to the pinnacle of the jump, and then it’s just me versus gravity. I start to fall. “Oh no!” I say as I flail my arms and try to grasp the edge of the roof, but I’m three yards too far from it. The number in my head falls as quickly as my plummet to the earth. 392 feet. 390 feet 3 inches. 291 feet. My plummet continues. I see the fast approaching cement below. I flap my arms like a fool all the way to the bottom until I crash onto the side of my hip and feel the left side of my head smack against the concrete. I lay there uninjured as far as I can tell. I roll to my back and feel my left shoulder and left temple. Everything seems to be intact. I feel no wetness. No blood oozing. No apparent broken bones. I look up and laugh.

“No way,” I say out loud. I quickly stand and crouch and relaunch myself, but this time with an angle that’ll put me onto the rooftop instead of high past it. “Whoo!” I yell as I lift higher and higher towards the ridge of the roof. This time I’m able to grab the rim of the building’s roof and swing myself on top. I run excitedly to the opposite edge of the roof and look at the building below. It’s a parking garage. Perfect, I think to myself. I need a car, and there are plenty there to choose from. Without hesitation, I make the leap. The parking garage passes below me mockingly as I overshoot it by twenty yards and slam into the side of the next building and fall the length of it down to the bottom of the alley where the three dogs from the dumpster are now hiding. They yelp and run when I appear, and I feel horrible. I like dogs. No, I love dogs. The last thing in the world I want to do is frighten them.