2020
Friday
There was always something refreshing about running without bolting, so Barry climbed the entire set of stairs spiraling inside the building in what he liked to call ‘the earthly way’. It was a nice name, referring to the idea of soles of feet gripping the ground before launching into the race, like a cheetah’s non-retractable claws, and finding some kind of might from the earth itself. Opposed to what? He often wondered. As if his superpower came from, where? Space? An extraterrestrial origin, such as Superman’s in the comic books? Who cared, it was nice to think of it that way. Barry thrived to live a simple life with very straightforward fantasies.
Plus, he didn’t feel the need to bolt all the time. At this point of his vigilante career, he was in flawless shape. Everything in him ran before he even thought of it, everything moved and swung with infinite grace, everything was strength, unfiltered, unaltered, unburdened strength. After running every day, jumping around, literally doing nothing else, his body had become a running and jumping machine. He felt often like he could fly, and sometimes, something whispered to his ear, while he was in the midst of the bolt’s blue iridescent lightnings, that perhaps he would.
After conquering the stairs without using his power, Barry sighed with satisfaction and passed the little door leading to the cabinet at the threshold of the rooftop. The first thing he saw was the sparks glittering on the helmets of a row of a dozen droids, as the rain had lightly begun to fall. OH SHIT. The survival fear of the lizard part of his brain, under the cerebellum, flashed with distress, but he didn’t have time to reception it nor draw any kind of analysis from it, because one nanosecond after he entered the narrow hall, all the droids cannons fired at him.
He hunched his shoulders forward and produced a strong bolt, his mind now devoted whole to slaloming between the hungry bullets which presented themselves as an eager wall of shiny dots, resembling some kind of passionate audience to greet his arrival and desiring to eat him up. It proved more difficult than he thought due to the large number of the shots but with a few back drops and twists of his spine, he rotated through all the projectiles with sophistication. Landing in a superhero pause at the end of the motion, he turned around and faced the mrai moumous, ready to kick some ass.
Something caught his eye at this moment, while the bubble of the bolt around him hadn’t even completely dissolved yet. It was another bullet, still slowed down by his spell but advancing mercilessly towards him and the soapy shield around him. Oh fuck, Barry thought, oh no, and his hand slid forward in front of him in a reflex defensive move like he wished to swat the thing away or asked for rendition. At the same time, a red flashing alarm began to pour down through his brain and ring his ears. There wasn’t much that he could do except watch the sheltering bolt bubble evaporate and the tiny piece of metal continue its course. OH NO. They were locked on colliding paths and an instant of horror unfolded on Barry’s most recent log of deplorable things, and then something whispered in his ear, brace. The bubble melted in a cozy plic, its skinny wet membrane pierced at the last instant by the steel. “Motherfu” BRACE
There was that. The shot cut him in half and projected him backwards against the wall behind him. The smash was spirit-scattering and he barely caught his fall midway, bounced back on the ground rockily, eyeing the window on the side, already bending his knees to aim at it. Barry ignored the quake wave that the impact had created and that was still in birth-motion through his body and limbs, thrusting himself into the leap. He was about to glide through it when a second detonation crackled behind him and another long needle of hot air went through the top part of his arm, spinning him like a ballet dancer while still in hopping mode, so Barry lost his footing and fell like a stone down the building he had just climbed. Such élan, he saw and, now, such disgrace.
What the fuck, his neurons raced to compute how everything fit with everything else and nothing, but speed was no longer on his side. He fell down ten stories, went through a glass roof, then a different straw roof extension, then a laminated plastic umbrella before landing savagely at the back of a truck carrying some bags of sand. The crash spat the vehicle into some swerving madness on the side while meeting some upcoming traffic and, only because the driver must have been extremely skilled, it veered again and found a balance. The man hit the brakes in a mighty screech, three manoeuvres which sent Barry flying on all sides of the truck like the little ball of an ancient flipper station. Throwing an arm out blindly, he was able to take hold on the railing of the cargo and pull himself under its skinny refuge. He glued himself against the metal wall and waited without moving for what was to follow, deafened by the tremorous beats of his heart.
“What the hell fell into my truck?” the driver was infuriated but so were four or five other commuters who had to avoid a pileup and had been forced to park in a Tetris formation. The sounds of the voices of humans reached Barry’s ears, and he heard some car doors slam, some footsteps and some perplexed comments, theories, like, it was a bird, like an eagle, like a TV, like a grand piano, like a person. A person. Barry tucked himself closer to the meager wall. And yet in his brain, the urgency of the people gathering around him while he was in a vulnerable and exposed position was not met by the urgency of the predicament he knew he was carrying from his encounter with the robots at the top of the building.
In his dispersed brain, there was a reality in which he had been shot in the arm, but he wasn’t sure which arm it was anymore, especially after tumbling like some dirty laundry on top of so many bags of hard sand, which had inverted the nodes in his brain. Nothing seemed to hinder any arm movements of his at this point and as adrenaline was still coursing through his veins, but there had been another shot, of greater concern, that had snapped him like a twig in the middle of his stomach. His hand brushed against it and he felt something warm and wet. Something very wet and sticky. Now was the time to completely freak out. Barry couldn’t think of what to do next because he knew that he was waiting for the pain.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
And it came right away. Without ceremony or outside trigger, the center of his abdomen exploded. Following this geyser of lava, the burst of fire dried out the air inside his lungs at once, expelling a drop of saliva in the air quite elegantly from his lips. He opened his mouth desperately to invite more oxygen in but, his feet kicking chaotically under the assault of the anguish, he managed only to push himself backwards and slide into a crevasse between some of the sandbags.
He became engulfed by darkness and dust, sucked down and squeezed like some slime in the hands of a furious child. Thrashing around only helped bury him deeper until his butt hit something hard, the bottom of the truck. It was time to bolt, he saw, as the weight of the bags was too great and there was now a small crowd of people amassed around the truck. He could recognize where there weren’t any other options.
Executing a bolt in the middle of civilians in a covert mission wasn’t so recommended, as there were many security cameras planted here and there on the street and modern technology was easily able to slow down a video to get acquainted with the details of a person trying to hide in supersonic speed, but Barry was running out of ideas. And in the middle of his current distress, he found the path to speed and force tedious. There was an absence of muscle memory he identified, swallowed entirely by the pain, and he couldn’t remember where his legs were, where his arms were. He couldn’t remember anything. A larger bag at the top of the pile under which he was stuck tilted down and collapsed on him, blocking any exit. You’ve got to be kidding mee
“Bolt motherfucker bolt” he finally fumed enough to recover the gist of it and, with the energy of despair, produced another very small bubble that punched the sides of the sandbags and created a big enough opening. Using the electrical impulse from deep within him, Barry felt the ache become more distant, as if dulled itself by the sphere of magic around him. The sounds fainted sourdine, underwater-like and the dash propelled him up through the ample passage between the sacks, until he could climb up. At the top of the cargo, out of ideas, he rolled hopelessly off the railway but landed on the concrete road with learned grace. Upon hitting the hard ground, another blast of pain tore open inside of his stomach and he was forced to his knees in a hiccup, one fist down, before collapsing entirely on his side holding himself with both arms. His feet pedaled aimlessly in the void and his face melted against the asphalt.
Barry curled into a fetal position. How was such suffering possible? How would he survive it? An owl-like moan escaped his lips, muffled by the dryness of the absence of air, breathe, breathe! But he couldn’t, he couldn’t even scream or call anyone, somewhere between his stomach and his mouth, the oxygen was cut off, forbidden, and all he was swallowing were little wheezes. He kept wheezing and suffocating, swung his head up and saw the dozen pairs of legs of the spectators still frozen into the bolt bubble around him, a lady pointing an accusatory finger at the truck, offended to have her evening plans interrupted by such nonsense.
Help mee, Barry closed his eyes and seriously thought about sticking here and just letting time resume its course, abandoning his fate to the people at the scene and waiting for them to see that he was hurt and assist him, are you FUCKING INSANE, a voice thundered between his two cerebral hemispheres and, with it, the air returned. Surprisingly thick and warm. He opened his eyes wide and upwards and the air poured down Barry’s throat, burning, and the dusk sky poured into his eyes. It was some hot air, which drilled into his gut with more fire, particles of dust from the pollution, the sand and the rocky landscape of the road faults mixing with his own inside incendiaries, but it was air. Barry took a big gulp of it and breathed it avidly. His whole body started trembling at the passage of the air.
He breathed more and allowed himself a few more seconds of being rolled into a ball. The middle of his body was now very wet, his hands slimy against his suit. He stuck one arm out of his lonely embrace and attempted to lift himself up on one elbow. It was simply impossible. A large piece of scorching rock was stuck diagonally inside his abdomen, making it impossible to move without it grating and scratching, stirring fire in fire. “Get up get up get uup” He dragged himself forward a little bit, like a slug rubbing its belly against the cement, pulled by his one free hand. Impossible, he swallowed hard, shook his head. This method of traveling wasn’t going to function either.
Barry couldn’t accept this, or, if he did, then what? Between two impossibles he went ahead and fought the lesser of the two. Endangering his identity led to putting the ones of his teammates at risk and to adding catastrophe to disaster. Hanging out defeated and flat on the ground and letting the bubble of bolt dissipate and just waiting would bring threat to more than just himself. He had to get a grip. “Come ooon” he pushed firmly on his arm and hand again in a frustrated groan, let go of his abdomen and added the other hand into the motion and, finally he gained a little bit of altitude. Get uup!
Huffing and puffing his newly restored breath, Barry sent another bolt wave around him, which undulated through the previous one while that one was sill closing in, and the soup of both was probably going to inflict some harm to the eardrums of the bystanders on its path and swelling. Nothing irreparable though, Barry thought with a mix of remorse and self-forgiveness, as he didn’t see how he could rise up again without the juice of his power. It did the trick indeed and gathered his knees under his butt, straightened them and boosted him standing up, one hand clinging to his stomach, and he fell against a parking meter, the top of his body crumbled on it for another precious second. Hanging forward, he felt two heavy tears drop from his eyes and watched them mix with a small puddle of very red blood that already seemed to follow his path. Jesus Christ.
WALK, he did, but tripped on his own feet and fell on one knee once more, stopped his descent with one hand, used the bolting energy to stretch up again and then at last managed to take a few zigzag steps. He was in total disbelief of what was happening to him. How could you, one moment of your existence, stand tall and healthy and moving agilely through every day between sunrise to sunset and, the next, be vanquished ever so mercilessly and unable to align one foot after the other?
Somewhere in this state of refusal and incredulity he felt the wetness of his stomach trickle under his knees and reach the heel of his left foot. There is some blood in my shoe. The fear of death crept up inside his heart. He knew this feeling, he had known it before, only one short time, soon passed, but he had been introduced to it. The physical manifestation of this fear before the intellectual idea followed, was enough in one’s chest to shake anyone in their boots and he felt his own heart squeezed by it and his teeth chatter inside his mouth. It was something that, even soon parted with, couldn’t be forgotten, something that an organism remembered in each cell, and it could become very paralyzing. The best advice about this phenomenon had come from Darlene, ‘don’t think about death’ He focused on walking, fell into a garbage container before hitting a mailbox and barely avoided collision with another car, then saw his destination in the distance between the brown trees: the Jolly Bar, which had opened just a few hours ago in the early afternoon.