Class Fives: Origins (11 page)

“Son of a bitch...” Dan breathed slowly.

Roger emitted a small chuckle, raised his other hand and brought the palms together, the metallic lump between them. It looked as if he was expending no more effort than Dan himself would use to dry his hands on a soft towel.

Roger’s hands shifted around, back and forth, the palms rubbing, then he extended one of them with a down-turned fist and opened the fingers.

A gleaming, smooth, silver lump dropped with a light thunk to the table.

Dan stared down at it, dumbfounded.

“And this,” Dan said slowly, “Is where I say ‘How the Hell did you do that?”

Roger actually snorted with genuine amusement.

“So say it.”

Dan looked up at him.

“Okay. How the Hell did you do that?”

Roger leaned forward, and Dan could see he was now relaxed, clearly more at ease.

“I don’t know. I’ve never known how. I could always just do it.”

Dan snatched a look at him.

“Anything else you can do?”

Roger leaned back.

“I can’t be hurt. By anything.”

Dan stared at him.

“So, what… if I was to take out my weapon and shoot you in the chest, what would happen?”

“I’d be disappointed. But if you need to, go right ahead.”

Dan glanced around.

“Not in here, thanks. But what would happen? Seriously.”

“Nothing,” Roger said simply. “The bullet would flatten and drop to the floor, that’s all.”

Dan considered this a moment.

“Fire?” he asked, his tone curious.

Roger gave a sour look and raised his hands to indicate the condition of his shirt.

“Explosions?”

Roger shook his head and reached to gently raise his cup.

“A nuke?”

Finishing his sip, Roger shook his head.

“Don’t think so,” he said casually.

“What about disease? Getting sick.”

Roger carefully lowered his cup.

“Nope.”

Dan stared at him as he considered.

“So… you’re incredibly strong… and you are invulnerable to injury.”

Roger nodded but shot a warning glance at Dan as he leaned back once more.

“If you mention that asshole in the red cape and booties with the big “S” on his underwear, I’ll flatten your car into a pancake.”

Dan’s brows rose and he nodded.

“Right. You must get that a lot.”

Roger shook his head with a little sigh.

“Not often. I try not to let anybody know. I don’t want anybody to know. I’m just a guy, that’s all. I’m just ordinary.”

“Okay,” Dan responded slowly.

After a moment he leaned forward again.

“But you don’t think it’s wrong, what you can do, do you? I mean, it isn’t bad, just being what it is. You seem like a good guy. A decent man.”

Roger gave a weak shrug, and again his eyes began to drift.

“Yeah, well…” he muttered.

“Must have been tough, growing up.”

Again Roger snorted quietly.

“No kidding. My mom, she…”

He paused, seemed to gather himself a moment before continuing.

“I broke her arm when I was a year old. Just a kid, flailing around while she was holding me. Broke it clean through. Up until then she didn’t know I couldn’t be hurt. But when that happened she dropped me. I landed on my head. Broke the floorboards. After that she took to wearing this… armor thing she created. Football pads, helmet, padded sweat suit. It helped some, but I still wound up hurting her sometimes.”

He paused, licked his lips, his mind cast back to those uncomfortable memories.

“I didn’t go to an actual school until I was sixteen. Until she was sure I understood that I was… different. She taught me herself before that. Kept me home. Kept me… safe. She was a good lady.”

“What about your dad.”

Roger gave a sour, twisted smile.

“Well, we never played catch.”

Dan nodded slowly.

“And you can’t… turn it off. Stop it.”

Roger shook his head.

“No. But I’m aware of it. I’m very careful. Every minute of every day. If I slip, if I let myself forget about it…”

“Right,” Dan responded quietly. “Like I said. It must be Hell.”

Roger actually smiled.

“You haven’t a clue,” he said sadly.

They sat in silence for several minutes, then Roger looked up at Dan, his expression growing tense again.

“So what now?” he said flatly.

Dan drew in a thoughtful breath and gave a small shrug.

“Now,” he responded, “I have to figure out how to explain how I lost you. We’re not supposed to do that… lose people we go after. But don’t worry about that. I’m pretty good at fudging paperwork. And those police radios can sure suck sometimes.”

Roger’s brow furrowed.

“You’re not going to try to turn me in?”

“For what? Saving a couple of kid’s lives? Sorry, but I don’t think that’s even a misdemeanor.”

“I don’t understand,” Roger replied. “Why’d you chase me down?”

Dan felt a twinge of embarrassment, and leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table and fixing on Roger intently.

“I really did just want to thank you. I know, I should report it to somebody, although how I’d explain it I don’t even want to think about. But you didn’t do anything wrong. You did a good thing. No, a great thing. And you didn’t have to. You could have just kept driving. But you didn’t. You stopped. And you helped. You shouldn’t be punished for that, or have your life screwed up because of it. But I hope you’ll think about it. I hope you realize how proud you should be of it. Not it, but what you did. You’re a special man, Roger. And you should be proud of who you are.”

He could see the moisture collecting in the other man’s eyes just before Roger turned his head away as if to look across the room, and blinked rapidly.

“Look,” Dan said, reaching into his shirt pocket and retrieving one of his business cards, “This is my work number. My cell number is on the back. If you ever need anything, or just want to talk, which I don’t guess you have much chance to do, especially about this, then you call me, okay? I’m serious.”

Roger nodded sharply, now shifting in his seat as if unsure whether he should bolt for the door or not.

Dan slid from the booth, dug into his pocket to extract a few bills and place them on the table.

“I’m very honored to have met you, Roger. You take care, all right?”

Roger looked up at him, and a slow half-smile gripped the corner of his mouth.

“Every single minute of my life,” he said.

Dan gave one final nod of farewell, turned and walked away.

After he had gone, Roger slid carefully from the booth so as not to shred it with an uncontrolled, sudden motion and turned toward the door. Then he stopped, turned back to look at the table and, after a moment's hesitation, carefully plucked up the card and slid it into his pocket.

Dan was trembling by the time he reached the cruiser, and after he slipped the key into the ignition, he had to settle back against the seat and let himself calm down.

My God, he thought, it was incredible. The kind of thing that, if you hadn’t seen it yourself, would make you wonder what the person telling it to you was smoking.

He had seen a true act of superhuman heroism. He’d watched this ordinary man, who just wanted to be left alone to live a normal life, throw away his anonymity and save a pair of children from a death so horrible Dan couldn’t even conceive of it without feeling sick. He had saved those little lives. He had done the very thing Dan had always longed to be able to do, the kind of thing that had made him join the police force in the first place. And the guy didn’t want it. Amazing.

But then, if he really was trapped inside this incredible thing, unable to shut it off, give it up, even for a little while, just so he could have a normal life… if it forced him to a never-ending vigil, watching every motion, every touch, because if he slipped for one instant he might literally kill someone, then his life must be an unending nightmare.

That was the concept that he simply couldn’t process, a side of that longed-for fantasy of power and responsibility he had never even thought of before now. We think the hero is this upstanding, happy figure of goodness and justice. We never consider that he may go home and spend the night sobbing his eyes out at the pure misery of his own existence.

My God, he thought. My God in Heaven.

And then the image popped into his mind and he groaned.

“Oh shit. Jim.”

What would Jim have told the back-up when it arrived? And what would it sound like to them?

Well, Dan reasoned, he would tell them it just looked like the guy had walked into that inferno and pulled it apart with his bare hands. But that was, of course, impossible. Most likely he was one of the victims, who had managed to wriggle out of his vehicle, crawl out of the wreckage and run off. Some idiot had stopped to do a Lookie-Lou at the carnage and stupidly left his car just sitting there, in the middle of the highway. And this guy, this dazed, hysterical survivor, had jumped in it and roared off to God knows where.

It was a ridiculous story, totally incredible. But they would accept it, because they had themselves surely seen some crazy things while working on various cases of their own. And if the alternative was some guy pulling cars around like they were candy wrappers, then they’d jump on the survivor idea like rats on cheese.

Okay, he told himself. He had to get back, start trying to straighten the whole mess out.

He leaned forward to turn the key, gunning the engine to life, and then hesitated.

Oh Hell, he told himself, and reached to where the small notebook and pen were tucked into the little indentation beneath the dashboard.

He wrote down the license plate number of the car that he had followed to this diner, feeling both logical and ashamed at what, now that he’d met the guy, seemed a betrayal, and silently hoped Roger would call him some time.

Then he put the pen and notebook aside, dropped the cruiser into gear and pulled out of the lot.

4

Noticed

Marvin stepped back from the long blackboard that made up the wall of this classroom, and stared at the equations. He took them in, operation by operation, letting his mind settle them into the chain of events they represented, making sure each one fit snugly with the one preceding it before turning his attention to the next.

So far it was all pretty routine, he reasoned. The forces all balanced, the effect followed what was expected. The math seemed to work. Right up until that one operation smack in the middle of the calculation. That was where it all broke down. From that point onwards the numbers seemed to crumple like powder, into meaningless nonsense, and what came out at the far end was little more than gibberish, ending in a final result of infinity. In physics a result of infinity was, essentially, a non-result, utterly meaningless or, at least, completely useless. The very idea itself invalidated the entire formula, or in the current case, everything beyond that flawed operation.

He’d been trying to see if some other concept might replace it and make the calculations fall into line, but so far nothing was even remotely relevant to the problem he was attempting, for going into a second week now, to solve. And every avenue he tried just slammed him into a metaphorical brick wall of meaningless numbers.

Even attempting to fudge the numbers representing the mass, which drove the entire formula, seemed only to throw the final result further and further off-target. Which had to mean that whatever it was that had erupted from somewhere on the planet three and a half decades ago, it wasn’t Dark Matter. Dark Energy, perhaps, he mused? That equally mysterious something that worked on, and through, the mass that Dark Matter surely was. But he had no means of even calculating how to represent it here in this lengthy scribble of symbols and numbers. No one had ever managed to measure it, witness its direct effects, or pick it apart to the point of knowing what units to count it in. If Dark Matter was, at least, noticeable by its gravitational effects on objects in the visible universe, Dark Energy was a complete mystery. It was a crude place-holder, the mathematical equivalent of a glaring question mark, stuck into a formula to simply keep it temporarily propped up until enlightenment of some kind revealed itself elsewhere in the calculations. For what Marvin was attempting, it was worse than useless.

He had already run and rerun the software, letting the swirling cascade of numbers track their way back along the path the unknown force, which had scattered the now-errant asteroids, had come from and the system had finally stated, definitively, that at the moment it would have been emitted, it was the Euro-Asian continent that had been pointed to that portion of the sky.

So it had originated in Russia. Either seemed possible, and as the software was only making a very educated guess to where this mystery force had spewed from, it would be impossible to narrow down the specific origin location any further.

Just to be certain, he had already used his security clearance to obtain logs of all emissions, all readings of any significant energy, that might have been recorded from the Eurasian continent for the entire decade surrounding the date the software said the discharge would have occurred. But there had been nothing. No burst of electromagnetic energy or radiation of any kind had been picked up by the constantly watching satellites that remained parked over that landmass, suspiciously scanning for anything of note. There weren’t even any rocket launches within a month to either side of the date the software kept insisting was when the stream of energy had been unleashed.

His features slowly screwed up into a sour expression and he stepped back up to the blackboard, dropping the little fragment of chalk into the tray that hung below the flat, wide piece of slate.

At this rate, he realized, he would never figure it out. And there was something about it that was telling him this was something he really should try to understand. That was important, not just for its scientific mystery, but for the uncomfortable possibilities it caused to flit through his mind.