Somewhere in the haze of hours passing, Stumblebum said his farewell to me. "The girl's right. Army will be here soon, and I can't be hanging around when that happens. I'm vulnerable when I'm out of gas. Guess I'll just have to catch up with you later, man," he said. "Don't you dare die in the meantime, or I'll feel like an asshole, alright?" And with that, he walked off into the dark of the building. Gone away without another word.

Never one to sit still for long, I thought. That was just his personality.

"Later then," I said, a little too late. The two of them had found some painkillers in the cabinet a while back and they slowed me down considerably. Although they didn't do enough to erase my pain, they helped me to sleep and they calmed me down a bit, which was really all I asked for. Once Stumblebum left us, I tried my best to let go and pass out. To sleep my way through this whole thing, if I could.

The waiting itself was agony, but I never fully escaped it.

With only the small light a phone could provide, time passed at a crawl under the anxiety of my injuries. Though I wasn't any medical expert, I understood what it would mean if I didn't get help soon. There was rot in my leg, and it was dying from suffocation. Even if I survived now, it was likely something would happen which I dared not consider in full. Keeping those thoughts at bay was difficult with nothing to distract me.

I tried chatting up the girl in an attempt to take my mind off of things, but it was little more than idle small talk, hardly engaging. Her name was Carly. She came from up North. She'd never met someone with superpowers before and so she had all the usual curiosities, of course.

Things such as, what's it feel like? Like having an extra sense? Like moving an invisible muscle? Can you turn it off, or does it always stay on?

I did my best to answer all her questions, but when it came down to the particulars things got awkward fast.

"Can you read my mind, then? Like, right now?" She asked, some flirtation in her undertone.

Unfortunately, nobody ever really expects you to say yes, and my little nod made her suddenly self-conscious.

"Oh," she said. "Ha-ha. Maybe don't, actually." The suggestion was playful overlying her concern, but it was already too late for. My power was almost always automatically on.

She had seen me on the news a few days ago; that much I knew. But what she wouldn't say out loud was that she found me intimidating, and more than a little bit attractive, too.

As flattering as this was to learn, the feeling was not mutual. Not because she was unappealing, though there was that too if I was being harsh, but rather because the last thing I wanted right now was to be affected by her kind of aura. My heartrate needed to stay where it was, quite frankly. I was simply not in the mood for excitement. It would have been better therefore to remain ignorant, but now that I saw her interest, it was staring me in the face.

Granted, many guys would have killed for insight like mine. To cut through all the subtlety and see with my waking eyes the pink coloration flushing through her was gratifying, and infinitely clearer than the signals one so often tended to miss. Yet, in the end, it was still nothing more to me than an inconvenience. It was hollow, all too hollow.

Not really an ego-booster, either, I thought, since I knew exactly where I stood with the fairer sex.

From reading people in the past, I had a clear idea of my level of attractiveness. I was situated right between plain-looking and a dirt-baggy kind of charming. I saw my own representation constantly reflected back to me in the people I read, so I had no uncertainty there. Very seldom did I like what I saw in that reflection, more often witnessing their disdain for my various foibles. But there was one recent exception…

When that little girl had seen me back in the suburbs, she had seen me as a hero, and that stuck with me. I treasured that feeling.

For a moment I wasn't just some person. I was someone special. I imagined that was the way my parent's might have seen me. When you loved someone, they were singular in the universe, but in the eyes of everyone else, they were just an instance of a type. That facelessness gnawed at me, and it was what so often had turned me away when I considered leaving my isolation in the past.

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I broke the silence now with Carly. I decided to subvert her concerns a bit. "You have a pet, right? Small. A cat." It was an educated guess taken forward by cues she in her reactions. "A tabby." This was supplemented by simple factoids. Tabbies were the most common breed, after all.

"Oh my gosh, yeah. Her name is Athena."

I smiled. "And her behavior is... Hmm. She's a troublemaker. Yeah. A real goddess of war." That successfully redirected things back to small talk as the girl launched into a series of stories, gushing over her pet. My research on the basic tricks and tenets of mentalism had been saving my ass now since the start of all this. Cold reads were second nature for me.

Wow, this cat is awful, I chuckled to myself as I listened.

About the time she was done explaining to me the animal's constant vomiting and why it was always in her shoes, the lights came back on. They flooded in around us, causing temporary blindness and then a rising expectation. The time had finally come.

Carly predicted it. The military prioritized the hospitals for their help, and for once they were doing their job properly.

It wasn't long then until they arrived after that, sweeping through floor by floor to see who was left and who could be saved. Luckily, our floor was close to the entrance, meaning we were up on the first few passes.

Soldiers decked out in gear very similar to the kind Sixes wore showed themselves next. It was high-end equipment, including full helmets that gave them protection from psychics like me. One of them spotted us in the emergency room and stopped only briefly to check on the situation.

"Med evac is on the way," he spoke, his voice deeply modulated through his rebreather.

"This is Headcase," Carly told him as he was moving on, stopping him in his tracks that way. "He's a super!"

As much as I hated the idea of receiving special treatment, at least in principle, the soldier nodded tightly, and I was grateful that he picked up his pace. They were going to get me seen to. Indeed, very soon after a gurney with two medics appeared in our room.

It was bittersweet, knowing what was bound to come.

Carly gave me a squeeze on the hand as they crowded up next to me. Wordlessly, we exchanged goodbyes, and with a heave, I was moved via my bed sheets over to the gurney, quickly to be wheeled out.

I doubt I'll be seeing her again, I thought.

Dizzying, bright fluorescent lights flew by above me as we moved then. The medics looked me over and checked my pulse without slowing down. One of them sheered open my pants leg with a pair of scissors to get a better look at the wound.

"My leg is messed up bad," I said, stating the obvious. “Carrion bit it.”

"We're going to get you taken care of, Headcase. You're going to be okay," one of the medics reassured.

"What about... the villains? Did they get them?"

"The villains’ leader was killed and the rest of them are being captured. The city is under government control. All you need to focus on right now is us. Can you tell me if you have any other injuries?"

My suspicion was that they meant Rathole. But he was right, and I put all nefarious plots out of my mind. “None that I know of. My feet, I guess.” Everything else paled in comparison to the worry I had over the numbness in my leg. It was likely I had broken ribs and a concussion also from way I had been thrown around, however this was nothing new. Such injuries barely had a chance to heal from my time against the rampager.

As they collected the information they needed, we made it outside where a series of tents was waiting. Cars had been swept aside to make room in the parking lot. There, massive helicopters were constantly coming in and out, dropping off shipping-container buildings that integrated together into a complete make-shift ward.

Once inside the tent and amongst all the other injured and sick they'd recovered, I was treated to a privately curtained room. A doctor rushed into the area, squirted his hands with disinfectant, and loomed over me. His eyes were cold and blue, I noted. His aura was mellow and complex.

He took one look at my leg, seeing where it had been exposed by sheers, then immediately rushed back out without speaking to me.

Nothing could be told by his aura; he was far too experienced for that kind of emotionalism. Only the furrow in his brow said what needed saying.

You knew this was the way it would be, I told myself.

The two medics stayed by my side the entire time that he was gone, working to get me set up with a new IV and fluids and trying to keep me occupied with conversation. When at last the doctor came back, he had an entire passel of assistants with him, and I didn't take that to be good news.

"We need to get you prepped for surgery," he said. "There’s massive tissue damage to your leg and until we begin operation we won't know how much of it is salvageable. As long as you understand that then there’s no time to waste."

Salvageable. That word hit me like a ton of bricks.

My mouth had become so dry that I could do no more than croak out my response. "Okay."

The doctor nodded and gestured for us to leave. They took me through the corridors of the tents then, back into the interior of one of the deployed container buildings where I was shifted once again, this time onto a surgical table from my gurney. I watched as a nurse approached with syringe in hand and began to inject a clear substance into my IV, knowing immediately what it was for. As all of this came upon me so quickly, I had no choice but to resign myself to what was about to happen.

The substance put me under quickly, like liquid dread in my veins.

Already I was certain that when I awoke, things wouldn’t be the same.