Unpossible (27 page)

"Not really," I say. "Well, one."

The four guards in the room suddenly tense. I hear a subtle but bracing sound: The double creak of a leather gloves pulling back metal triggers.

"I can’t be killed," I say.

I smile. "I mean, not because of anything I can do. It’s just—look. When I was hanging out with Soliton and the Protectors, I must have been kidnapped once a month. Held hostage, used as bait, snared in death traps. They especially liked to dangle me."

"What?"

"Over tubs of acid, piranhas, lava pits, you name it—villains are very big on dangling. Twenty years of this, ever since I was a kid. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been shot at, blown up, tossed into rivers, knifed, pummeled, thrown off buildings and bridges—"

"You don’t say."

"Oh yeah, half a dozen times at least. My right ear drum’s still perforated from being chucked out of a plane." I lean forward, and the guard puts a hand on my chest. I ignore him. "See, here’s the thing. I should be dead a hundred times over. But the rules of the universe don’t allow it. I’m not bragging—that just seems to be the way it works."

The warden smiles coldly. "Cold" is the only form available to him, the sole version taught in Sadistic Warden School. "That’s not a super power, Mr. King. That’s a delusion. One shared by every teenager who doesn’t wear a seatbelt."

The guards’ guns are still aimed at me, but I no longer seem to be in imminent danger. The warden opens a manila folder. "You went missing from St. Adolphus Psychiatric Hospital in Modesto, California six months ago. No one’s seen you since."

I shrug.

He flips through more papers. "Where have you been, Mr. King?"

"Does it matter?" I say. I wait for him to look up. "Really. Are you at all interested? Will it make a difference?"

He considers this. "No, as a matter of fact." He closes the folder. "I’ve already called for a helicopter to take you out of here and back to your doctors in California. This is not a hospital."

"I’ve heard that."

"People like you, even famous people, are not in my remit. You are not what this institution is for."

"But what about my crime? Don’t you want to punish me?"

"What crime is that?"

"Assaulting a federal officer." And then I kick him in the nuts.

I’ll give the warden this: He doesn’t go down. He staggers back, red-faced and wincing. He gets his breath back while the guards whack me like a piñata until the candy comes out. And by candy, I mean, not candy.

After a while the warden kneels and lifts my head off the floor. "You win, Mr. King. You get an overnight stay." He taps my forehead. "You’re going to talk to my men, and you’re going to tell them everything—your deepest fear, your favorite color, your grandmother’s social security number. You’re going to tell us where you’ve been for six months, why you’re here now, and what you thought you would accomplish. Everything."

I make a sound that ends in a question mark.

"Yes," he says. "Everything."

Picture it from above, Dear Reader, say from a huge, invisible eyeball floating above the plains. From 10,000 feet, the Ant Hill is a gray dot in the middle of a huge blank square on the North Dakota map, a cement speck surrounded by half a million acres of treeless prairie. Drop a few thousand feet. You make out a single road heading toward the heart of the Ant Hill. And then you make out concentric rings that the road pierces: the outermost ring is just a chain-link fence, easy enough to drive through, but the next two inner rings are taller, reinforced, with sturdy gates. The road ends at the innermost ring, a cement wall twenty feet tall. Inside the ring is an oval of cobalt blue, a manmade lake. Beside the lake is a gray cooling tower like a funeral urn, then the cement dome of the reactor building, and half a dozen smaller buildings huddling close. The familiar shapes of the tower and dome, repeated in nuclear power plants across the globe, have always put me in mind of mosques.

The Antioch Federal Nuclear Facility was built in the ’80s, designed to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium for the hungry guts of America’s ICBMs. A few months after Soliton’s arrival, however, a freak accident shut the plant down. (Freak accidents became a lot more common after the Big S touched down, and we would have had to stop referring to them by that name if they hadn’t created so many freaks.) Before the plant could reopen, Soliton’s adventures had (a) ended the cold war, and (b) provided a need for a new kind of jail.

So they renovated. You couldn’t see much of the work on the surface. But that’s the thing about ant hills.

The guards drag me through approximately 3,000 miles of tunnels. I could be wrong—they’d smacked me around quite a bit. I’m just happy that I haven’t blacked out or thrown up.

They toss me into the cell. I’m expecting a sarcastic line from the guards—"Welcome to the Ant Hill," perhaps—but they disappoint me by merely slamming the door.

I pull myself up onto the bunk and lay there for awhile. There’s a toilet, a sink, and a cardboard box holding a roll of toilet paper. There don’t seem to be any cameras in the cement ceiling—I’m too low a threat for the expensive rooms.

My stomach rumbles.

"Jesus, hold on a minute," I say.

I pull myself into a sitting position, put my hands on my knees, and take a deep breath. "Okay," I say. "One, two—"

My stomach lurches, and a ball of peach-colored goo flies out of my mouth and splats against the floor. It looks like Silly Putty, but it gleams with silvery veins like snail tracks. It’s still connected to my gullet by a long, shiny tail, and I can feel the stuff shifting in my belly. "Gahh!" I say. Which means, roughly, Hurry the hell up.

The long stream of putty reels out of my stomach and out my throat like a magician’s scarf trick. The glob on the floor grows as it absorbs mass, becoming a sphere about ten inches in diameter. With a final, discomfiting fwip! the last of it snaps free from my throat. The sphere starts to quiver like a wet dog, flinging silvery flecks in all directions.

I fall back against the cot.

A tiny, warbling voice says, "Just for the record? I am never doing that again."

A tiny hand appears beside my head, and then a doll-size thing climbs onto the cot. It looks like a miniature Michelin Man, all peachy beige, including round white eyes and a Kermit the Frog mouth. "What the hell took you so long?" he says. "The gel was starting to burn off I was in there so long. You know what it smells like in there? Exactly what you think it smells like."

"I wasn’t enjoying it either, Plex."

He squints at my face. "You provoked them, didn’t you? I couldn’t make out what the hell you did to the warden."

I sit up. "He was going to send me back to the hospital. Now at least we get to stay the night." I nod toward the door. "You think you can get through it?"

"Please," he says, and rolls his ping pong ball eyes. "Take this." He holds up a three-fingered hand. The middle finger bulges, becomes a sphere, and then falls off with a wet pop.

I pick up the blob, mush it a bit between thumb and index finger, and press it into my ear. It’s uncomfortably warm, like fresh-chewed gum. "Match the skin tone, okay?" I tell him. "I don’t need to look like I’ve got a wad of white boy in my ear. Okay, give me a test."

Check one, check two. Sibilance. Sibilance. The voice is loud in my ear. The vibration tickles.

"Don’t scream or you’ll blow out another ear drum," I say.

You know, he says in a confidential voice. If I go up any more of your orifices, we’re registering for place settings.

"Just get going. I’ll wait here for you." I fall back against the cot. No pillow, but I don’t think it’s going to interrupt my sleep.

Guards come for me hours later. I assume it’s morning. They put shackles on my wrists and legs, then frog march me to an elevator. According to my research there are 15 levels in the Ant Hill. We start on level 5 and then go up to level one. The administration offices are just a short walk from there.

The warden looks upset. He tells the guards to secure me to the guest chair and then get out. Then he picks up a sheaf of papers, glances at them, and looks at me with an expression of fresh disgust. "What’s the matter with you?"

"You’re going to have to be more specific."

"This nonsense about wanting to tell me Soliton’s true identity."

You told them that? Plex says in my ear.

"I didn’t think you’d want me to tell your employees."

"You’re lying."

"Warden, I was a member of the Protectors—sorry, ‘Soliton and the Protectors.’" The big guy always insisted we say it that way: He Gladys, we Pips.

"You weren’t one of them. You just followed them around."

"Again with the demeaning statements. Just because I wasn’t one of the people in capes didn’t mean I wasn’t part of the team. I was the first member, if you want to know. I was there on Day One. If you look at the first pictures of when he landed—"

"I’ve seen them. You’re the boy dressed up in the baseball suit."

"I wasn’t dressed up, I was the bat boy. That was an official Cubs uniform."

I loved that suit. Loved everything about that job, but especially hanging out with the players, chewing gum in the dugout while they chewed tobacco. A guy in my small group at the hospital said it proved I had an early tendency toward hero worship. Another patient said I had a costume fetish. I’m not saying they’re wrong.

I was standing in the bullpen when somebody shouted and there he was, a man in T-shirt and jeans tumbling out of the empty sky like a shot bird. At first I thought a drunk had jumped from the upper deck. But no, the angle was all wrong, he was directly over center field and falling at tremendous speed. He hit and the turf exploded and the stadium went silent. Everyone just stood there. I don’t know why I moved first.

"I was the first one to help him out of the crater," I tell the warden. "The first person he spoke to on the planet. He took off his glasses, shook my hand and said, ‘Thanks, Eddie.’"

"He knew your name?"

"Spooky, huh? I didn’t think much of it at the time. But later—twenty years later, embarrassingly enough—I realized that was the first clue. The first bit of evidence telling me what he was. Have you have ever read the Gnostic Gospels, warden? No, of course not. But maybe you’ve heard of them. National Geographic ran a translation of the Gospel of Judas a few years ago that suggested that the man had no choice but to—"

"Stop babbling. You’re not making any sense."

"Fine, let me bring it down to your level. How about Bazooka Joe comics?"

"What do you want, Mr. King?"

Well, I tried. "I want to talk to Ray Wisnewski," I say.

He pauses half a second too long. "Who?"

Eddie, is it part of the plan to tell them the plan?

"Come on," I say to the warden. "Ray Wisnewski—WarHead? The man who killed two million people in Chicago?"

"I don’t know what—"

"The glowing guy in your basement. I know he’s here. All I need is a half hour conversation. See, I’m doing a kind of informal deposition. I’m putting together a case against Soliton."

"You really are insane."

"No, you’re supposed to say, Case against Soliton? He’s a hero, what did he ever do? And then I tell you that he’s responsible for the deaths of millions, not to mention everyone on the planet who’s been injured, widowed, made into an orphan, generally had their lives destroyed every time Soliton and the Protectors went toe to toe with some—"

"You’re blaming him for Chicago? He didn’t set off WarHead—that was the Headhunter."

"Ah. Let’s talk about the late Dr. Hunter. Did you know that Soliton captured him not two months before Chicago? And then he was sent here, to your prison. Even though he’d escaped from the Ant Hill four times before."

"You think I’m responsible?"

"I think you’re incompetent, but no, not responsible. You’re just a cog—a malfunctioning cog, maybe, with a couple teeth missing, whose very flaws may be necessary to the continued running of the system—but not the prime mover. Not by a long shot. Soliton is the one responsible. Not just for Chicago—for everything." I can see he’s too angry to listen properly. "So how about it. You walk me down to wherever you’re keeping WarHead—"