Human for a Day (9781101552391) (30 page)

He glares at me. “I'm twenty-two, Michael.”

Twenty-two? It's strange to realize that he's right. He was fifteen when I adopted him after Maniac killed his parents, but that was . . . seven years ago. Where did the time go? How had I failed to notice he'd grown into a lithe, attractive young man? “Even so . . . it's . . . it's
wrong
.”

“Maybe where we came from. Not here.” He pulls a bandana from his pocket, wipes his mouth. Blood still trickles from his nose but it's slowing. “This world is better than ours, Michael. It's complex and it's mundane and it's sometimes tedious, but it's not just the same round of villains and fights and secret identities over and over again. It's
real
, Michael. And here I can be what I've always wanted to be, instead of just playing a role.” He holds out the bandana. “And so can you.”

Sprout keeps holding out the bandana.

After a while I take it, and wipe my own mouth.

Then I stand up.

“I'm a hero, Richard. It may be a role, but it's the only role I know.”

Sprout just looks at me. The expression on his blood-spattered face is a sick compound of longing, sadness, and disappointment. Perhaps I'm learning how to understand what I see in this world.

I wonder what the expression on my own face tells him.

“Give me the magazine, Sprout. We'll take it to the warehouse where we came in. I figure that's the best place to try going back to our world.”

“No.”

Sprout lies at my feet, looking so small and weak, the front of his blue hoodie stained black with his blood. I could take the magazine from him easily. “I'll find another copy.”

“You don't have any money to buy one.”

“I'll steal it.”

He gives a weak little laugh. “Liar.”

I have to smile myself. “Okay, maybe not.” I sit back down. “Come back with me, Sprout. You know it's where we belong.”

He sits up, leans against me. His shoulder is warm, the only warm thing in this cold, garbage-strewn alley, and I let it rest on my chest. “Give this world a chance, Michael. You've only just arrived. I've already found a job at a nursery. You could work there, too.” He looks up at me. His nose has stopped bleeding. “We could share the apartment.”

I consider the idea. I put my arm around my sidekick, lean back against the filthy brick wall, and think very hard about it. This world is amazing, with its details and colors and motions and flavors. And to share it with Sprout would be . . . something I hadn't even realized I desired.

But in the end, it's duty that wins out. “I'm sorry, Sprout. Even if I wanted to—and there's a part of me that does, believe me—it's more than just you and me. There are people depending on us back home. If we don't go back there, who'll keep the Scimitar Sisters in check?” I give him one last squeeze, disentangle myself, and stand up. “Coming?”

“You're sure I can't change your mind?”

I'm so, so tempted. “I'm sure.”

“Then I'm coming too.” He stands, brushes himself off. “I'd rather be a cartoon hero with you than alone here.”

We walk hand-in-hand back to the warehouse. As we pass the coffee shop, I pause. Sprout looks up at me, expectant. “I, uh . . . I still have some of my powers here.” I clear my throat. “I wonder if there's. . . .if there's any way we can bring . . . some of this world, back to ours?”

“I don't think so.” He points to a small shield printed in the corner of the magazine's cover. “There are rules against it.”

Finally, we find ourselves again in the dark, echoey space where we entered this world. I think about how strange it looked to me when I first arrived, and I realize I've grown used to these new perceptions. My old world will seem so flat and colorless by comparison.

Sprout stands beside me as I spread the magazine out in a patch of sunlight. There is no joy in me as I contemplate the garish images full of POW and KRUNCH, only a dull sense of obligation. “It's not too late to change your mind,” Sprout says. “We can make a life together here.”

“I'm sorry, Sprout. Our world needs saving.” But even as I say it, I know I'm trying to convince myself as well as him. I hold out my hand.

Without a word, he takes it.

I bend down and stare hard at the last page, showing my cartoon avatar falling into the vortex between worlds. I exert my will, block out all other sensations, focus my powers on the ink-saturated wood pulp. Somehow, I know, I can use this image of the portal to return myself and Sprout to the world where we were born.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

I concentrate. I work my power. I push and pull and strain . . . this is as hard as the time I used pea vines to temporarily close up the Grand Canyon. Harder.

I strain still more intensely. The printed vortex begins to whirl.

I feel again, just as I did on that first day in the experimental greenhouse, the deep connection between my soul and the green life underlying the page . . .

I feel the warmth of Sprout's hand in mine.

And I realize that the connection runs both ways.

With an unprecedented effort of will, I reverse my power.

Where before the meteor 's green energy had flowed into me at my moment of greatest need, now I send the energy flowing from myself into the printed page.

I scream in pain as the power drains from me like my life's blood.

The image before me springs to life. Just as the metal claws release, the cartoon me on the page reaches down and tears open his belt. Seeds of all descriptions pour out in their thousands, most falling into the vortex, but many others sprouting and twining and filling the portal with leaves and stems and branches. I bounce off the web of vegetable matter, springing right back toward Dr. Diabolus. WHAM! My fist connects with the villain's chin.

Then all is blackness.

 

Later. I open my eyes, and the first thing I see is Dr. Diabolus's lab. Everything is flat, static, in eight garish colors. But then I blink, and realize I've fallen face-first into the magazine spread on the floor before me.

I sit up. I'm no longer looking at the last page of The Amazing Phyto-Man issue 157. It's now the first page of issue 158, a single large panel. In it Dr. Diabolus, threatened by an enormous Venus flytrap, cowers at the controls of his dimensional portal, through which a grinning Sprout steps to take the hand of Phyto-Man. All's well in Metro City.

“Michael?” Richard is just awakening beside me. “Wha . . . what just happened?”

It takes me a long, reflective moment to find an answer to his question. “I . . . I sent the power back where it came from, I think.” I look within myself. It certainly isn't in there anymore. “It's with him now.” I tap the page.

Richard's eyes dart from the page to my face. “But that's you.”

“Not any more. I'm just Michael now.” I stroke the flat, cartoon version of myself with my fingertips. “Phyto-Man is back where he belongs. I don't know how much of me went with him, but I hope . . . I hope he enjoyed his day in this world. Maybe he can use what I learned here to make Metro City a better place.”

“But what about us? What happens next?”

I close the magazine. “I don't know. Isn't it amazing ?”

 

Jim C. Hines

 

 

 

 

A
ccording to Claire's phone, it had been three days and forty-seven minutes since the cave-in.

In the first few hours, as the ringing in her ears began to die and the dust settled, she had explored every inch of the thirty-foot stretch of tunnel, from the useless elevator shaft to the impassible wall of fallen rock.

Her head pounded, every beat a pickaxe against the inside of her skull. Her mouth was dusty and dry like old rags, and her lips were cracked. For three days, she had drunk nothing but her own urine, her only food an old apple-cinnamon granola bar she had brought down with her.

Dust in the air scattered the light from her helmet lamp, painting a static-like blur over the rubble where the ceiling had collapsed behind her. Broken, flat-surfaced slabs of stone that must weigh at least a ton apiece protruded from the debris, along with splintered timbers and a twisted electrical conduit.

Rock crunched under her boots as she moved closer, searching the dust for eddies that might indicate airflow. She knew it was pointless. She would be wiser to sit and rest, to conserve her energy. But she could only sit for so long before the despair crushed her as inexorably as another cave-in.

“Anthony! Tim!” Her shouts sounded faint to her ears, still half-deaf. After three days, her team had long since escaped . . . assuming they had been far enough back when the mine shaft collapsed. “Nicole, Ann? Anyone?”

She prayed they had escaped. That they were even now on the surface, telling the officials of White Lion Energy that Claire Howell might still be alive, and planning her rescue . . . a rescue which would still be days in coming, at best.

It had taken a day and a half to send Claire's team in after the first methane explosion trapped sixteen people in the coal mine. With a second cave-in so soon after the first, they would be even more cautious.

She moved to the far end of the tunnel. A yellow sign on the metal gate proclaimed this elevator shaft six. The gate had crinkled like cardboard during the cave-in.

Her lamp might as well have been a nightlight for all the good it did. According to the readings she had taken at least a dozen times, there was no hope of escape here. The shaft went down only 318 feet before hitting an obstruction. It should have gone far deeper, meaning either the elevator car was jammed or else the shaft itself had collapsed.

“Hello?” Her words bounced back from the shaft, weak and distant. “This is Claire Howell. Can anyone hear me?”

Nothing. Just like the last hundred times she had tried. She backed away from the elevator and sat against the wall. She tried her radio again, to no avail. She checked her phone next, knowing there would be no reception. “Too bad.” she muttered. That would have made a great commercial. “More bars, even a half mile underground.”

She tapped the phone's screen, smearing dust over the glass as she pulled up her e-mail. The battery was at 68 percent. Plenty of power to write her goodbyes. If she was ever found, and if the phone was plugged back in, it should automatically send her messages.

Her hands shook, and she closed the app with a violent swipe of her finger. They would find her. She just had to wait. Had to stay sane long enough for them to dig her out.

If they could even reach her.

If they were willing to risk another team for the sake of one surveyor.

The fear grew stronger with every breath of stale air. Her throat tightened. She would have wept, but her body was too dehydrated for tears.

She opened up the e-book app on her phone. When she was a child, when she had bad dreams, her father would come into her room and tell her stories until she calmed enough to sleep.

She scrolled to a collection of short fiction by H. C. Howell. Her throat tightened at the dedication:
For Claire.

For years, she had told herself she'd get around to reading her father 's work, but life always got in the way. She choked on a laugh. That wouldn't be a problem much longer, would it?

Pushing back the fear, she switched off her helmet lamp and scrolled to the first story.

 

“The one good thing about the zombie apocalypse is that it's a short-lived apocalypse.”

Clara Hamilton took the non-sequitur in stride. She didn't recognize the British man with the cane, but it wouldn't be the first time a student hadn't bothered to show up until midway through the semester. “Thank you, but we were discussing the respiratory system.”

“Oh yes, they've got lungs.” The man leaned back in the molded plastic chair, crossing his feet beneath the desk. He ignored the muffled laughter of the other students. His voice was light, but his eyes burned. “Otherwise they wouldn't be able to groan. But think about it. The flies and maggots would devour them. Have you ever seen zombies picking the bugs off of one another like chimps? And they can't heal, so any injury will go gangrenous just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “The trouble is, while they'll die off within weeks or even days, that doesn't help you tonight.”

Glass shattered somewhere in the building, making Clara and several of her students jump.

“We don't have much time, darling.” The man jumped to his feet, graceful and fluid as a dancer. “Henry Cornwell the Third, at your service.”

Clara set her notes onto the desk and moved to open the doorway. She saw students and one teacher hurrying through the hall, but nothing to indicate mass panic or—she flushed to think she had even considered it—zombies.

And then she saw the blood. One of the students clutched his arm to his side. Blood dripped through his fingers, leaving a speckled trail on the tile floor.

Another window broke, this one closer. Screams reverberated through the hallway.

Clara spun back to her class. “Nobody panic.” Ten years of teaching everything from elementary school through community college had honed her voice, allowing her to slice through the fear and confusion.

A sharp popping sound came from the east wing of the building. A gunshot? Protocol for a school shooting was to go into lockdown and wait for the police, but that was the first shot she had heard, and wouldn't explain the wounded student in the hall. She turned to the stranger. “Not that I believe you, but how many zombies are we talking about?”