I waited
outside the door.
Some
shuffling noises echoed down the dark corridor. My heart thudding in my chest, I
moved closer, as the sounds went from shuffling to feet scraping. No signal
yet. Then a bang, like someone striking a wall.
“Summer!” I
called under my breath. My steps began to speed up, down the dimly lit hall,
turning a corner to an ajar door. Someone
was running over the floor, feet pounding. The door banged open and a bizarre
sight emerged.
“Steve, get out of the way—!” Summer yelled. She
never screamed when she was scared, she yelled.
She burst
out of the darkness, completely naked, and pushed past me. Her legs stretched
like elastic to take her further, faster. I’d never seen her run like that; she
looked like some alien entity and in the dim light it looked freaky – and not
helping was her lack of clothes. One second she was a speeding, stretching pale
blur, the next second I was struck into by her fast moving Flexer body, like
being body slammed by a huge basketball. I knocked into the wooden floor. The
world went black and felt like it was still moving even after I’d stopped. She
kept going.
I didn’t
want to believe she said what she did. I wanted to believe she said ‘get out!’
and I had imagined the rest. Her voice must have echoed weirdly in the hallway,
creating the illusion of extra speech.
She turned
the corner and footsteps carried on over the floor, before the door to the
corridor opened and then slammed shut again.
As I
groaned and rolled over, a broad shadow descended over my body. I scrambled to
get away, but a burly hand scrunched around each of my wrists and began
dragging me into the darkness that Summer had just escaped from.
I was slung
over a man’s back and carried into another, smaller room of the warehouse. A
dirty fluorescent light strip buzzed on, the main light source apart from some
dirty perfectly circular windows which glowed an eerie blue from the moonlight.
There was broken glass around the floor, dirty used coffee cups, flecks of
black dust and stubbed cigarettes, and a pile of Summer’s clothes. She must
have stretched out of them.
I was dropped
into a chair, my arms were wrenched behind me and tied with tape, and then my
ankles were taped to the chair legs. My thoughts were going like a bullet
train: I was worried for Summer; trying to work out why she’d bailed out of the
exam like that. Performance anxiety? She’d never gotten it before. She must
have seen something she hadn’t studied for. Would the board penalize her for
aborting? She’d have to re-sit with another partner. Unless I deliberately
failed, too, and we could re-sit together. That seemed like the thing to do –
the only thing to do now. Except I
was tied up.
The man
appeared at my front. This guy wasn’t wearing a suit, but jeans and a hoodie,
with the hood on, and underneath a mask, and weirdly, a backwards baseball cap
underneath. The cap’s visor must have been cut off to fit.
“I’m sorry,
but I’m not able to continue,” I announced. “My partner left the exam, so we have
to reschedule.”
The man
blinked slowly.
“Gonna to try
something?” Then he bent in my face and roared: “Well, DO IT!”
I suppressed
a flinch.
“Excuse me?
Look, I just said that—”
A
big-knuckled fist came flying out of nowhere and socked me hard in the face. My
head snapped to the side and a blur of stars rushed past my eyes. The pain dug
into my skull about a second later.
As the man
slid a chair right up in front of me and dropped into it, a pair of pumps clacked
across the floor.
When my
vision sharpened again, a woman had appeared in the room behind the man, a
woman I’d only seen on the TV news: a real life Stepford wife with a trim
figure, flawless styled hair and dress, like some investment banker’s young
wife at a luncheon.
It took a
second to sink in.
She was a Reducer. Her name was Lucy DeLuca, and
she had no place being here, in a supervised exam setting. The only place she
should have been was behind bars in the high security Fangelburg Super Penitentiary.
I stared
back at the broad-shouldered masked man, making the connection. The guy was also
a Super, and Lucy’s henchman, Rodney the Reconstructor.
According
to the archive of extensive case files I kept on my PC, Lucy and Rodney had
been solo Supervillains until Rodney had a run in with Lucy’s husband, after a
bar fight over gambling debt, Rodney had snapped and reconstructed him into a dollar
bill and spent him. As revenge, Lucy had Rodney’s wife kidnapped, reduced, and
put into a tiny world inside a glass bottle, blackmailing Rodney for visitation
in exchange for being her henchman. She also implanted him with a special
device to control his reconstruction ability. They were now on-off dating.
“Just
listen, sweetie,” the prim woman held unblinking eye contact, “before you commit
yourself to something you’ll regret.” She steepled her manicured hands in front
of her face and her voice went down to a firm strain:
“If you
have the Flexer deformity, like that girl, it’s time to drop the act.”
“What are
you talking about?” I cried, “I’m not a Flexer! Let me go!”
Where was
the test? Where were the crisis actors? Where was Summer? She must have
recognized the villains. Rodney must have tried to subdue her and she stretched
out of her clothes trying to escape. I’d never seen her do that before.
Lucy
watched me for what seemed like a long time. Then murmured to her male henchman:
“Run the
litmus test.”
Rodney jumped
up and punched me in the stomach.
“No reflex,”
he concluded, as I choked for breath.
The woman
paced around my chair, heels clacking, but always keeping herself stationed
safely behind Rodney’s bulk form.
“Then what do you do?” she sniffed down at me.
“Why would
you want me? I’m just a Natural.”
Her look of
puzzlement slowly turned into a smile that showed too many perfect teeth.
“Well, young
man, I have a secret,” her voice simpered like I was a well-behaved child.
“I hate Supers. “Her mouth was smiling but
her eyes were glassy and hard. ”They’ve watched all our traditional societal
family values crumble and they won’t do anything about it. They stand back in
the shadows, letting their powers grow dusty on the shelf. And ultimately, who
pays the price? You Naturals pay for
it, because the Super state has no interest in taking the reins from Natural
leaders and trying to remake a better Natural world for them. If you want to
know why your Natural society is such a disgusting, delinquent mess right now,
you only have us to blame. Anyway,” she turned away, fussing over her hair.
“You’re free to leave.”
I stared
between her and Rodney, waiting to be untied.
She
continued:
“Yes, there’s
a very special way out of here. We have a little house for you down in my
developing project neighbourhood, Locketopia. A little size-jigging and your
new home could be anything from a condo to a castle. And best of all, no
Supers. All your neighbors will be perfect, ordinary, law-abiding little
Naturals. Your world has so many social problems but my development is crime-free.
It’s just a slight scale adjustment, and it’ll feel l like home.”
“Where is
it?” I said. All fear had left me since Summer had run out. The memory stung
more than Rodney’s punches.
She lifted
her necklace, showing off the locket.
“Locketopia,”
she explained.
I didn’t
understand, at first.
“That’s too
small.”
“Don’t be
fooled by the current dimensions. It’s small to you now,” her voice rose and fell with mounting glee, “but wait ‘til
you’re even smaller, then it’ll seem
like a kingdom!”
Her pumps
clopped closer and closer.
Unless she
was totally deranged, she couldn’t really mean that the village was stored
inside the locket itself. You’d have to be microscopic to live in a village
that fit in the locket. Invisible to the naked eye, completely lost and
forgotten to the normal size world.
You can’t shrink a person, I thought desperately. At least, you can’t shrink them all. You
can reduce the body but the person inside stays the same. But my consciousness
would be trapped in whichever micro hell my body occupied. My consciousness
would be trapped somewhere tinier than a grain of sand. And the biggest insult;
it would all belong to Lucy.
And who
knew if the neighborhood inside the locket was truly perfect? It might have
been a wrecked dystopia. There was no prove it wasn’t; no way for Lucy to know.
My voice
came out in pure reaction:
“Fuck your
tiny town! I’d rather die!”
Lucy gave a
very thin-lipped smile.
“So be it.
It’ll make us both better off, I suppose. Locketopia is an oasis from reality;
there’s no room for problem-starters.”
Swishing
around, she barked at Rodney:
“He’s a
walking crime scene now. Make him a bug.”
One her
polished pumps grinded over the floor in preparation.
The
henchman grumbled:
“Enough
bugs! Let me make him into a bubble and send him out into the park’s tot
playpen.”
There was a
good reason Lucy kept Rodney on a metaphorical chain. A Reconstructor was so much worse than a Reducer; not only could he change my size, he could transform me
into whatever he wanted, person, animal, and inanimate object, and possibly
worse of all, my new form would retain my consciousness.
This drew a
darkly interested look from Lucy.
“I hate
having to strangle plan A in the cradle, but that’s an awfully tempting plan
B.”
“He’s not
going to exist very long,” the man plunged on, bolstered by her compliment.
“The kids are gonna try and snatch him. They might try and blow him around for
a little while, but some kid’s gonna poke him and…pop.”
Lucy got to
the point:
“And
there’ll be no evidence, just a droplet on a child’s finger.”
The man
suggested:
“Or
tongue.”
Lucy’s
explosive laughter rocked the air. She was definitely deranged, I decided.
The sound
shook me as much as the thought of being popped. Would it hurt? Would I die or
would my consciousness carry on as a speck of water? – and then what? Would I
get absorbed into the skin of whoever popped me, or would I get swallowed? …And
would I still be conscious in the stomach, maybe being turned into a digestive
bubble forced through the intestinal tract? Just how long would my ordeal go
on?
“Just let
me go,” I strained, feeling utterly defeated, “I won’t tell anyone.”
Lucy’s face
downturned over my head.
“Lying
isn’t good for you, honey,” she barbed, having lost all patience and interest
in me now that I had no further role in her vision. “It might even stunt your
growth. Our little talk was fun. Now, Rodney’s going to get you fixed up.
You’re going to feel very wet and fragile, then we’ll open up the window and
let the draught do the rest. You’ll get sucked out into the grounds and we’ll
take bets on the winner of ‘puncture the bubble’.”
Rodney
stood over me, cracking his knuckles. I threw myself against the tape until my
shoulders ached. Suddenly she stopped.
“It’s a
shame,” she considered aloud. “I don’t want to hurt a Natural. I wish we could
make the Flexer girl into a bubble instead.”
She thrust
a cell phone onto my lap.
“Call her
up and invite her back in.”
I continued
to strain against the tape. The phone slid off my leg and clattered onto the
floor.
“You want
to leave, yes?” Lucy grated. “Give us the Flexer, and you can. Call her.”
“She
doesn’t have her phone,” I snapped. But she might, if she’d returned to the
Academy van, where our phones were.
She spun
away from me, pumps rapping as she passed over the wood floor.
“Rodney,”
she commanded, “our guest needs to retire and have a little think. Pull up a
house for him.”
The man
pulled a cigarette out of his pants pocket and bent to place it on the ground. As
he pinched it between his fingertips, the white stick expanded rapidly into a
white block. Windows and a door appeared. When he stepped back it was a standing
dollhouse on the floor. He extended one finger and gave the front door a poke,
causing it to swing inward, revealing a miniature room inside.
Now Lucy
was stepping over to me.
“You’re so
confused,” she simpered. “Clear your head and get back to me when your priorities
are straightened up. I’ll give you a couple of minutes.”
I stared at
the ludicrously small house with a gradual dawning sense of realization.
“Don’t do
this,” I cried, jerking myself against the chair.
She
hesitated, but not in sympathy.
“I’m not as
promiscuous with my power as Rodney,” she said. “He’s something of a hypnotist,
too, you know, and I suppose I’m a magician. He’s going to put you into a deep
sleep now, while I do a little magic trick.”
Lucy’s
pumps traipsed back and forth, skirting me, while Rodney stepped around behind
me.
Something
smacked into the back of my head and all the lights went out.