Holding it Together

By: Kaleb Orge

Chapter 1 - Backstory

There's something peaceful about going for a long drive. The quiet, the long stretch of road ahead, the gradual changing of the scenery. Ever since I was a little kid, my family'd pick up drive off to watch the sun set from somewhere new. Or new to us at least. My dad made a habit of that every month or so. Probably just to remind himself that the small town we lived in wasn't the end of the world.

All of that came to an end one Sunday after church. A Diamond-Reo jack-knifed in a strong wind and smashed our Studebaker right off the road. There was nothing Dad coulda done. All told we didn't get hurt too bad. Mom and Dad got bruises from their seat belts. My sister wasn't wearing hers and banged her head so good she didn't wake up for a week. I had my arm out the window and lets just say after that nobody expected me to win the Heisman. Even considering all that, I started to miss our family road trips. Nothing else we did as a family quite matched up. After a few more years I even got to wonder if I'd ever get that feeing of rightness those trips had back in my life.

Even though I'd had my arm damn near ripped off in the accident it didn't spoil the love I had for cars. I learned everything there was to know about engines and paint and about how new cars were put together on the factory floor. When I was fourteen I even talked my way into helping out around one of the mechanics in town during the summer. Damn near spent more time under the hoist than I did in my bed at night. And I loved it.

That's when a different fella got dealt bad hand...

Jimmy Wolchuck went into the rail doing about sixty out at the racetrack that summer. Poor guy wasn't hurt, just shook up real bad and his wife made him swear off racing “from now on till forever”. So my boss had bought the wreck and all Jimmy's tools for about ten cents on the dollar. He had planned to strip it for parts and sell the rest back to the racers at the track for triple what he's paid for them. That was until I he got me to do all the grunt work.

I must have stole at least two grand in parts from that busted up Chevy. I didn't even have a car to put em in. I just snuck em out so I could line them up on the shelves in my room and look at them before I went to bed at night. Fortunately my Momma didn't know cars from the ass end of a hippo or she probably woulda made me give them all back after an ass whupping and two hours in front of the minister come Sunday to save my soul.

Incidentally, I grew up to become an atheist.

Those parts would come in handy when Jimmy got back in the racing game two years later. I couldn't afford a car of my own but over the past two years I had rebuilt half those parts I'd put on my shelf and Jimmy was looking for someone to teach about cars and eventually take over driving before his wife finally made good on her threats to divorce him. I came by Jimmy's house with a big box full of those parts from his old car and I was in.

Two more years of working with Jimmy and my first stop after graduation was racing school. Not long after that, I got hired on as a backup driver for my first racing team. The rest, as they say is history.

Of course, when you consider the sort of driving I was making not even 10 years later, all that mechanical and racing experience eventually added up to jack shit.

“Just take your next left.” said the guy next to me. Greg was a nice enough guy, as far as guys named “Greg” went but I really had a hard time taking the guy seriously. He was supposed to be my new boss but he'd spent most of the ride out here asking me questions about the job his boss had just hired me to do. That might have had to do with the fact that I had to do all the driving and couldn't look at the colour-coded folders he kept juggling in and out of his salmon-coloured briefcase. But a few pointers sure would have been nice. Secretly I hoped my jump seat was giving him haemorrhoids.

As I turned left at the next intersection I noticed a sign in glossy red and yellow paint. It said “Radiation Hazard”. I started to stomp on my brakes but before my foot could finish switching pedals Greg said calmly “Just ignore that.” Alright. That officially freaked me the fuck out.

“How much farther?” I asked

“Just over a mile.”

I took a look at the speedometer and did some quick division. “66 seconds” I whispered.

Chapter 2 – Meeting Tommy

One of Greg's miles turned out to be closer to 3 and a third miles. I resolved never to let him explain football or golf to anyone, ever. It was still the middle of the afternoon and away from the city it wasn't nearly as hot, but there was no shade to be found anywhere either. Greg told me to stop in front of a house sitting on top of a small rise at the end of the roadway, so I did. He then unbuckled his lap belt and got out of the car, so I followed suit. We were walking up the front steps before I realized he wasn't going to say anything to me. “Wait, what are we doing?” I asked.

Greg flashed me a wry grin. “Meeting Tommy” he said. Then he rang the doorbell.

A small face peeked out of the curtains at us and spotted my car in the driveway.

“MMMAAAAWWWWMMMM! GREGG'S HEEERE!”

The face disappeared and Greg said “he'll be in his room” to no one in particular. There was a moment of silence followed by a great deal of thumping and the clicking of locks and deadbolts before the door was finally thrown open to admit us. Stephanie Markovik was tall, blond and completely dishevelled. She wore her blonde hair short in the front, and gathered the rest back in a ponytail held in place by two different scrunchies. One was blue the other some distant relative of pink. The only make-up she wore was a light red lipstick that was probably the remains of what she put on a day or two ago. For clothing she wore a beige cardigan over a blue v-necked T-shirt, blue jeans and flip-flops. I felt like an asshole for looking her up and down enough to burn the details into my memory but she was so good-looking I simply couldn't help myself. Next to her, Greg looked like some missionary out to sell bibles on behalf of God and the Gideons. It probably had to do more with the short-sleeved checked shirt and thick framed glasses than the black slacks or that godawful ugly briefcase. For the first time since I met Greg, I finally noticed he was wearing sneakers too. This guy seriously needed someone in his life with dress sense. Of course, who was I to talk? I showed up at this lady's house wearing a racing suit and a Metallica baseball cap. Thank Christ I'd forgotten my sunglasses in the car!

Greg handled the introductions. “Hey Steph, this is Rob Carter. He's going to be working with us as a consultant for the next few weeks.” Steph and I shook hands. Hellos were exchanged. “How's Tommy doing today?”

“He's good. It's been quiet today.” Steph said as she tried to tuck a few wispy strands back into her pony tail. “He's been asking about going to school again.”

“Don't worry. We'll talk to him.”

Steph stepped back and beckoned us into her home. Inside everything was either sandy brown or mauve. Not how I'd have decorated the place but not bad, all things considered. Steph closed the door behind us and pointed up the stairs to the second floor. “Tommy's upstairs”. I started to remove my shoes but Greg stopped me.

“Don't bother. We may need to get out of here in a hurry.” I looked up surprised and then over at Steph. She nodded nervously.

“Alright then.” I said. First Greg went up the stair to the next floor, then I went up the stairs after him. We found Tommy in his room sitting in front of a game console. I started to walk in but Greg put his hand up in front of my chest. We spent the next few minutes standing in the doorway while Tommy pretended to ignore us.

“I know you're there.” said Tommy after a while.

“Well Duh. The door's open.” Greg said; trying to sound thirteen.

“Whatever.” Tommy said, sounding fifteen.

“How are you doing Tommy?” Greg said

“Fine.”

“Excellent. I brought someone by with me today.”

“Yeah?”

“His names Rob.” when that failed to produce the desired response Greg elaborated. “Rob Carter. Of Benwick Racing?”

At the name of my old racing team Tommy leapt straight out of his chair. “The Robot Guy?” he exclaimed. I winced.

“Yeah, the robot guy” said Greg with a big, beaming smile. I clenched my fists and tried not to think about punching someone. Out front my car's engine started turning over. Tommy's face lit up all over. I felt something inside me fall. Another show-and-tell.

“That's right, I'm the robot guy” I said as I stepped in front of Greg, spread my hands and plastered on my best fake smile. At least it was a kid this time.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Chapter 3 – Care and Feeding of Monsters

The first thing Tommy wanted to do was scamper back downstairs to see my car up close. Greg and I sort of trailed behind him – what else were we supposed to do? When we got outside I got my first look at Tommy in the daylight. Tommy Markovik was pale, blonde like his mother and unusually short for his age. He was still just under five feet tall and his arms and legs were long gangly things stuck to the corners of his torso. Other than that there was really nothing all that special or weird about him. Nothing obvious like odd bulges or visible mutations. There was absolutely nothing on his body to indicate just how dangerous this kid actually was. Just a yellow and white striped shirt and Guess jeans above a pair of green sandals. Maybe a bit colour-blind.

Tommy put his hands on the driver's side door and leaned into my car. “Is this really your car?”

I had to grit my teeth as I felt him slide his hands along the door panel. “Yup. It's mine all right.”

“I saw it on the news and everything. Can you really transform it?”

“Yes I can. Would you like to see it?”

“Can I do it?” I felt Tommy reach into the cab and run his fingers over my steering wheel.

“Careful with your hands there. I'm the only one who can drive my car any more.”

Tommy pulled his head out of the driver's side window and looked back at me. “Aw, really?”

I flexed my stick-shift, dropping into Neutral and letting the car start to roll downhill. “Really.”

Tommy misread the situation and grabbed onto the window fame to try to stop the car from rolling. He lost his footing and fell down beside the car. I instantly hit the brakes before any part of Tommy wound up under my tires. I rushed over to help him up. “I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking.”

“Don't worry it's not your fault.” I looked over at Greg leaning against the porch railing. He just shrugged and held his hands in a way that seemed to say 'don't look at me.' So I helped Tommy stand the rest of the way up and dusted off his back and legs a little.

“I'm really sorry kid.”

“I said its okay. What are your Powers anyway?”

“My 'powers' huh. Well you just saw one of 'em. I can move my car like it was part of my own body and I can feel anything that touches my car. If I close my eyes I can even see out the dashcam sometimes.”

“Cool.”

“I can also turn the car into a giant robot. But I have to be inside the car for that.”

“Can I see you do it? Please?”

“Only if you tell me about your 'powers' after. Okay?”

Tommy looked crestfallen. “never mind.”

“Whoah there. I'm totally going to do it. Greg told me a little bit about your powers on the ride up and I just wanted to hear about it from you.” Out of the corner of my eye I caught Greg making chopping motions with his hand against his neck. Change the subject. Now.

Too late. “I said never mind!” Tommy shouted. The kid glared at me and I could feel the ground under my feet start to vibrate.

I looked Tommy dead in the eye and thought about growing up with my little sister. “Fine! Be that way.” I said. Tommy's lip curled and he stalked back inside the house. The door slammed itself shut hard enough to dislodge the doorframe.

Greg stepped up next to me. “That went well.” he said.

“How long did it take before he started liking you?”

Me? He's a teenager Rob. He hates everybody.”

I was too scared to laugh. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stop. After a minute or two Greg gave me a pat on the back and showed me where one of the side entrances was. Stephanie was in the kitchen making coffee and cutting vegetables. “That went well.” she said.

“That's what I said” said Greg

“Tommy and I don't get a lot of guests.” she said looking at me. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Well, I guess it's my job now.” I said

Greg hefted his briefcase. “Actually, your job is to learn how to do this job. Mind if we borrow the dinner table?” he said, looking over at Stephanie.

“That's fine,” she said as she started chopping a new carrot into matchsticks.

Greg led the way over to the table on the other side of the kitchen island. It seated six. I wondered why that was. Greg sat down at the middle of the table facing Stephanie as she started on a red bell pepper. Once he was comfortable he opened the briefcase and started hauling out those coloured folders I'd seen on the drive up. Once he'd pulled out about five of the things he took out an expensive pen and opened the orangey-yellow folder. He pointed at the top sheet with his pen. “We haven't figured out a master file system yet so we're stuck carrying around duplicate copies of each client's entire case file. It's a huge security risk but since each case is so different...”

“Okay.” I said “just point me down the track.”

“Okay. Tommy's a special case. He gets weekly home visits and Steph keeps a journal of 'incidents' for us to check over. After that we sign a couple forms and its back to the office. Anything to report this week Steph?” he asked.

“Not really. A couple broken glasses and some minor tremors. It's been a good week.” she said.

I had one of those moments where I wondered what the hell I was doing and started rubbing my jaw with both hands. Greg noticed and put his hand on my shoulder. “You're doing great. Just hang in there.” he said. Steph started giggling.

“Alright, what's next?” I asked.

Over the next ten minutes Greg walked me through the paperwork for a home visit with Tommy and in the middle, Steph brought over a plate loaded with veggies and ranch dressing. “Sorry, we're out of veggie dip until next week.” she said.

“We've got a rotating delivery schedule for groceries and DVD releases.” Greg said to me. He tossed a baby blue folder in front of me. “Check it out.”

Everything about Tommy's life was committed to paper in one folder or another. Doctor's visits, growth measurements, diet, daily activities, favourite cartoon. Hell, someone had even weighed all of the kid's bowel movements between the ages of three and four and a half. Now Tommy lived in a cute two-story house with no one but his mother for almost ten miles in any direction. Just how much more afraid of this kid could the government actually be? Then again, maybe the whole reason Greg and I were here was because we weren't government.

Chapter 4 – Meeting with the Mentor

Greg worked for a non-governmental social outreach program called “Parahuman Support Services”. Even sitting next to him at Steph's kitchen table, I still wasn't sure if I qualified as an actual employee yet. After all, I had walked into the PSS offices for the first time only a few hours ago. The meeting with Greg's boss Daniel Lake had been so short and to the point that I hardly had time to realize it had happened. “Mister Carter” he had said from behind his immense oak desk once his secretary had ushered me into the dimly lit private office. “I'm glad to see you accepted my invitation this morning.”

“I had an opening.” I said

“I imagine so, now that the racing commission has had time to reflect on your new reality.”

“I'm not big on small talk. Can we get on with whatever it is I'm here for?”

“Leave it to a NASCAR driver to be in a hurry to get started. Very well, suffice it to say that given the nature of your spectacular, shall we say, Emergence two months ago, it came as no surprise to me when our legal team caught wind of a bit of a storm gathering around you. Let me see if I've got this right. First your chief sponsor pulled out, gutting your team's budget for next season. Second, your car's been barred from racing due to 'unlicensed modifications'. And third, in order to recoup its losses your own racing team's filed suit against you for the 'irreparable damage' you did to their 2 million dollar car. Sound about right?”

It sounded exactly right.

I felt my eyes narrow “How do you know all that?”

Lake leaned back and folded his hands in his lap. “A lawsuit is public information. Our county even keeps an online database. The rest wasn't too hard to guess.”

“All right, so why am I here?”

“I'd like to offer you a job.”

“As what, your driver?”

“Not exactly. Right now you are getting a lot of media attention as a newly-Emerged parahuman. Millions of people watched your first transformation live. I want to harness that awareness and shed some light on how society treats people like us.”

“People like us?”

Lake leaned forward and crossed his arms on the desk in front of him. That was when I got my first up-close look at his face. A bunch of dark lines stretched out under his skin from the bridge of his nose across his left cheek and from above his left eyebrow to his temple. The lines gathered themselves along the left side of his neck and joined up with a data bus just above his collar. He turned his head slightly to the right and I could see the lines pull taut and begin to slide under his skin before the pain made him wince and stop after only a few degrees. “Yes mister Carter, people like us. Whatever it is that's causing Emergence isn't going to stop with just you or me. It's going to continue indefinitely. Possibly forever. And that means the world has to get used to people like you and I being around whether they like it or not.

I firmly believe that powers or no powers nothing really changes when a person Emerges. They still have the same hopes and the same goals and the same problems as they did before. The purpose of my foundation is to give parahumans and their communities the tools to live normal lives, if they want them. And I'm hoping you might want to be a part of that.”

“Listen, that's all noble and stuff but like you said I just want to live my life. I'm not sure I want to be anybody's mascot or anything.”

“Okay, then this is the part where I bribe you. This office has seen enough Emergence-related insurance claims to know that you will lose this lawsuit. Even after twenty years government refuses to label Emergence as a natural disaster, meaning liability falls squarely on the person with the superpowers every time. A couple months from now you'll be millions of dollars in debt, and you're already unable to race professionally in the United States. Without help you'll never be able to pay those debts back. Come work for me and I'll cover the payments for you, provide an insurance policy against further damages caused by your superpowers, and I'll even match your previous salary. All you have to do is hang around the office doing odd jobs and stand in the back whenever I hold a press conference. What do you say now?”

Well, what was I going to say? “Thanks, but I'd rather spend the rest of my life with no job and a soul-crushing amount of debt?” Hell no! I stood up, said “thank you very much”, shook the man's hand and he told me where to find Greg. I nodded, and showed myself out.

I had once heard an office described as “cubicle hell” on the internet. I can now attest that cubicle hell is real and it is where Greg spends the bulk of his time. Two entire floors of the PSS offices were filled with a maze of fuzzy grey dividers and hundreds of tiny desks manned by an army of bureaucratic drones. Greg's desk lay near the centre of the maze on the second floor. I noticed that only about half of the cubicles had plaques with the occupant's name on the wall and Greg wasn't part of that half. I walked past him at least three times before I just gave up and started asking random people for directions. After about twenty minutes of that I was almost convinced Greg didn't exist before I finally found him.

After just a single experience with cubicle hell, I could see why Greg preferred to work from Steph's kitchen table. We had about six times the room, three times as many chairs, friendly company and a complimentary snack platter. It was paradise.

* * * * *

“Looks like all we need are those signatures and then we're out of here.” Greg said the moment the paperwork for the visit was complete. I had to give the man my respect. He didn't so much as snag an extra carrot for the road. He just handed his pen over to Steph and gathered up his things while she scratched a signature onto a couple of forms and the two of us said our goodbyes and led me out of the house and over to my car with polite haste.

The whole way back, I found myself wanting to ask Greg what the deal with Tommy was. I had definitely noticed that I hadn't been shown any kind of documentation on any of the "incidents" Greg had alluded to. I decided not to once I looked over and saw how badly his hands were shaking. So we spent the whole trip back talking about golf. It seemed to calm him down.