At first Pressure’s shield held back the fire. The blue flames swirled around the bubble, making Afterimage feel like he was inside a snow globe, the clouds swirling around them. Wherever the fire touched the bubble, however, the shield shimmered and crackled as the flames tried to force their way inside.
“It’s getting harder to keep it up,” said Pressure, her tone strained. “It’s taking everything I have.” Despite her efforts the bubble slowly shrank, flames squeezing in around them.
“Then drop it. It’s going to collapse eventually. No reason to push yourself so hard.”
Stopping in front of the door at the fifteenth floor, she relented. The bubble popped out of existence, allowing the fire to engulf them.
As Afterimage experienced before, there was no heat, just a gentle tingle where the flames touched skin. It brushed across him, probing his body for powers to feed upon.
In truth it was liberating. He reached out to touch Audrey’s back, and he could feel the cloth beneath his fingertips without any grating irritation. It felt smooth, warm, and inviting. She looked back and smiled at him reassuringly.
“It’s like a massage. Almost feels good,” Her voice sounded muffled, as if coming from a long distance. In fact, it was the only thing he could hear. It felt strange not being able to hear Audrey’s heartbeat any longer.
“I don’t think anyone else caught in the fire is feeling so good,” he said. “We need to stop this.”
“Of course,” she agreed. Audrey reached out and opened the door, letting them onto the fifteenth floor.
Inside, the flames flooded the hallway, a sea of blue streamers flowing along the floor and ceiling with fingers wrapping around light fixtures and penetrating power outlets, siphoning away any energy that still remained. The flames were the only light source available.
Taking direction from signage in the hallway, they followed the arrows to the nursing station. As he suspected, there were people collapsed on the ground behind the counter, some slumped in their seats with heads resting on keyboards. He walked over to one and put a finger gently on her throat.
“Heart’s beating, but faintly.” Looking around he added, “Looks like they’re all breathing.”
“At least there’s that,” said Audrey. “It’s still amazing the detective made it out. Everyone here looks like they dropped where they were. Maybe he has latent powers.”
“Or eats too many donuts,” commented Tom, looking at a plate of half-eaten confections on the counter which brought to mind memories of his fight yesterday. “Blue fire guy is diabetic.”
“How do you know that?”
“I could smell it. And his power draws away energy. There may be a connection.”
“Would make sense.” Looking around, Audrey noticed the patient rooms across from the station. She poked her head through a couple doors to look inside. “The patients are unconscious, but they’re still breathing too.”
Curious, Tom looked into several more rooms himself. Moving through the tendrils of flame was disorienting, like walking under water. For him it was a mild version of what he experienced as part of his condition. Judging distances was difficult, making it easy to run into sharp corners, and his eyes ached as he tried to navigate. It was an all too familiar, so he took his steps carefully, making sure he was fully aware of his immediate surroundings with every step.
He saw two more unconscious patients, their chests gently rising and falling in time. A third, however, was deathly still. The man had froth trickling from his mouth. He went in to check for a pulse but found none.
“One dead,” called out Tom.
“Damn,” said Audrey, joining him in the room. She looked at the chart at the foot of the bed. “Cardiac patient. His heart stopped but nobody was able to help him.”
Tom’s curiosity withered. Though he and Audrey felt fine, this was a reminder that the situation was deadly serious. “We better end this before someone else dies. Let’s get to the room.” Audrey nodded in agreement and followed him out to room 1512.
It was easy to spot the room. Streams of blue fire roiled out, the tendrils snaking through the door and out into the hallway in both directions. The fire did not seem to care about physical boundaries either. Tom could see tendrils going into and through the glass windows to crawl along the walls outside the building.
As they approached there was a low roaring sound that gently climbed in volume with each step. Tom could feel it in his bones, his body rattling with the vibration. The tingling grew as well, becoming an uncomfortable sting that crawled along his skin like angry ants.
The roar of fire brought back memories of being surrounded by flames. Images of his childhood room burning around him flashed through his mind. He tried to reach out to his power to fend off the flames, but it refused to answer the call. His chest tightening in panic, he flung out an arm for support. His hand found Audrey. He gripped onto her, using the feel of her suit beneath his fingertips to steady him.
Her eyes widened in concern. “You alright?” She was yelling to be heard over the roar. He had to watch her lips to figure out what she was asking.
Her words were an anchor in a rough sea. This is different, he reminded himself. This time I am not a victim, and I am not alone. Easing his grip on her, Tom regained his composure and nodded. He gave her a thumbs up to let her know he was fine.
She examined his face, not taking his word for it, but eventually nodded her acceptance. Looking ahead once more, Audrey pushed forward with Tom beside her. Together they peeked around the edge of the open door to see what was inside.
Willard Granger lay in his hospital bed, body bending and relaxing convulsively, eyes and mouth open in a silent scream. The only sound, however, was the roar of the flames that rushed out of his mouth, nose, and eye sockets to cover the room and beyond. The sheets were crumpled in his spasming fists, and a spilled metal tray lay on the floor beside the bed. Vials and needles were scattered across the floor.
Audrey said something, but the sound was lost to him in the rush of the fire. Tom could hear nothing else but the roar of flames that came out of the man like screams. Something had gone horribly wrong with Granger and his powers.
With her hands, Audrey motioned that she was going in and for him to stay. Tom felt a sudden desire to draw her back but resisted the urge. He let her go. One of them needed to hang back to rescue the other if needed, and between them he was physically the strongest. He could carry her out even without his powers. Tom didn’t like it, but knew she was right. He let her move alone further into the room.
Audrey looked like a salmon trying to swim upstream. There was a current to the flames, and it was trying its best to push her away. Still, she struggled on, one ragged step at a time. Her progress was slow, and the strain on her face made him wonder if her powers gave her any protection at all so close to the fire’s source.
Then she stumbled. Concerned, he took a step into the room himself, only to feel the full force of the flames as they tried to sweep him away like a tidal wave. He could not imagine how Audrey had managed to get as far as she had. He watched her continue to struggle, but then her legs buckled entirely. She dropped to her knees at the foot of the bed, unable to go on.
He needed to get her out of there. He leaned into the headwind of azure fire. He was feeling what Detective Armstrong had described. The fire was sucking away the energy in his legs and arms. They felt like heavy bricks hanging from each limb. He had to shift his hips to shuffle forward a foot at a time.
Then the air changed. He could see Audrey’s bubble flicker into place, creating a swirling eddy of fire around her. The flames, finding a new target from which to draw energy, attacked the bubble with a vengeance. The tendrils wrapped and stabbed at it, the crackles of colliding powers booming above the roar of the fire.
She was attempting to draw pain from the fire, just as she had with Mathers and his cancer. But this was not the same. Granger’s power was raw and unfeeling, born of a mindless, autonomic bodily process required to sustain life. It gave nothing for Audrey to work with. As quickly as it started, the bubble collapsed. Audrey slid to the floor among the fallen vials.
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Audrey's attempt brought him inspiration. Pain fed her power, but energy fed his. The body’s senses were nothing more than a transfer of energy. Be it sound, light, smell, or the pull of gravity, energy stimulated nerves which led to perception. By allowing himself to experience those sensations he could draw that energy into himself and transform it, broadcasting it back into the world. If the flames wanted to feed, he would become a buffet for it to gorge upon and choke.
This meant embracing his condition. Tom had spent a lifetime avoiding that and had thought his powers were the key to never needing to deal with it again. But what Audrey said earlier in the stairwell was right. Avoiding his condition was not the same as facing it. He needed to stop running. It was time to decide what being Afterimage truly meant.
Dropping all his defenses, he opened himself up to his feelings. Because the flames drained away his discomfort as well as his powers, he had to reach deep inside himself to find them. He worked to taste the sour disinfectant in the air, feel the air scraping against his skin, listen for the roar of the flames digging at his ears like a horde of angry animals. He sought out the bad in the good, focusing on every irritating, hurtful thing he could feel about the world around him.
Something changed in the air. The fire altered direction, hitting him with the force of a gale. It wrapped around his body and bored into his skin, trying to feed off his energy. The sting and shriek of the fire sent knives through Afterimage’s body. It sent his condition into a loop, the flames feeding his powers as his powers fed upon them.
Opening himself further, he let the pain in, allowing his transformed perceptions to grow and expand. He could sense was the sterile smell of pure oxygen leaking through plastic tubing throughout the hospital, the chirping of insects coming out into the darkness of the night outside, and the sickening feel of George Mathers on the stairwell as he let loose his own powers to cripple Detectives Armstrong and Collins. There was the taste of disinfectant from a surgery several stories below being conducted by flashlight, the scent of bedpans left behind in the rush of evacuation, and the trail of blood left by Mathers when he pulled the IV catheter from his hand as he ran down the stairwell.
Beyond the hospital there was the sour smell of an entire city of people. There were the sweat covered lovers oblivious to the crisis on the hillside and the taste of vomit outside a bar on the other side of the river. There were children eating dinner with their families, their food falling on the floor to feed the hungry dogs at their feet. There was a man in bed feverish with illness, his pillow wet with snot, head surrounded by a wall of tissues.
For some, he could feel illness flowing into power, altering the world in subtle or overt ways. A young woman, confronted by three drunken men outside a bar, goes into an epileptic seizure and blinks out of existence only to reappear in the safety of her own home. A teenager stares at themselves in a mirror, tears of despair running down a face that starts to melt and flow like molasses until a stranger looked back.
None of it mattered. Here and now, he let the feelings pass into and through him, giving the fire a target to consume. He gave out a silent scream of pain himself as his mind reached a threshold where he could no longer contain the sights, sounds, and sensations inside him. He could feel his body on the verge of flying apart, the very molecules of it wanting to push away from each other to escape.
Barely able to hold himself together, he lunged into the room and wrapped Audrey in his arms. Then he released the power inside of him before the choice could be taken away.
A new sun was born in that room. All the energy he had taken in, more than any human could comprehend or endure, burst from him, expanding outward in a massive blast of light and heat.
Willard Granger and the bed on which he lay evaporated. Cloth burned, glass flowed, and metal melted, the energy consuming everything down to the concrete of the floors and walls.
The blue fire died with Willard Granger. No longer under attack and his energy expended, Afterimage was able to regain control over his power, allowing him to drop it entirely. Only Tom and Audrey were left in the epicenter of devastation. Pools of plastic and metal dripped around them, and a breeze flowed through the open doorway to replace the air burned away by the explosion. Except for a small circle about them, the floor, walls, and ceiling were blackened and scorched.
Audrey looked up blearily. “What happened?”
“It’s over.” It was all Tom could think to say, struggling with the scraping feel of her suit against his skin. What he had done had reset his condition, and though most had burned away with the explosion, there was enough left to be uncomfortable.
“Did we win?”
“We’re alive.”
“That’s good. And Granger?”
“He didn’t make it.” Like his mother, he thought. And like her, Willard Granger had been a victim of life and circumstance. He had not asked for what happened. He had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bigger questions was, would Granger and his mother be alive if Afterimage had never existed? Or would others have just died in their places? Would Alicia, the first life he saved, be dead now without him? Would Audrey have killed that assassin in the park if he had not been there to intervene? He realized he could no longer answer those questions. Life was neither better or worse with him in it. It would just be different.
Looking at Audrey in his arms, he knew that Pressure would likely exist even if he did not. She would have learned from her experiences and gone on, no matter what they were. He needed to do the same. He needed to stop dwelling on what could have been and accept how things were.
Hearing the sounds of unconscious people waking outside the room, he forced himself to focus. “We should go. Can you fly?”
“No, I’ve got nothing left.”
“I can fly us both. You may not like it, however.”
“Don’t worry. I touched you before, remember? I can take it.”
Afterimage turned on his power. With his perceptions up, he was able to survey the damage around them. The immediate room had taken the brunt of it, containing the explosion like a combustion chamber. The blast had gone out the door and melted the windows across the hallway, but the adjacent rooms, and their occupants, were unscathed. The explosion had been so brief and intense it had burned away the oxygen in the immediate vicinity, robbing the fire of fuel before anything else could ignite. For that Afterimage was immensely grateful.
In his arms, Audrey showed no signs of protest. Unlike others he had carried, she did not struggle with the loss of her normal senses, nor from the assault of their transformation. Instead she leaned into him, the beating of her heart peaceful and content.
That contentment would be shattered when she found out that Mathers had escaped. Now was not the time to dwell on that, however. They both needed to recover. Afterimage lifted Audrey up and flew through the door and out the damaged window.
Bringing her to his home, he laid her on the couch in his living room before dropping his glow.
“Where are we?” she asked, looking about.
“My home,” he said. Seeing the dirty food bowl left on the coffee table, he was suddenly self-conscious. He picked it up and carried it to the kitchen as he talked. “You need to rest, and your home is too public. I can’t take you there without being seen.”
“Of course,” she said, her tone sleepy and calm. When he returned, he curled up in his chair, hugging his knees up against his chest to hide behind them.
“So what now?” she asked curiously.
“Rest. Sleep if you’d like. You can go home tomorrow.”
She laid down on the couch, tucked one of the throw pillows under her head. “I’ll hurt when I wake up.”
“So will I,” he stated matter of factly.
“Then I guess we’re both in this together.”
“Yes. Yes, we are.”
She closed her eyes, and in moments her breathing softened into sleep.
Tom sat back in his chair, feeling comforted by the steady rhythm of Audrey’s breathing.
He must have slept himself, because he was jolted awake by the sound of a saw cutting into his skull. Eyes snapping open, he saw Audrey on the couch, each inhale and exhale the slice of a blade against his head. Despite the discomfort, he focused on her, taking slow, deep breaths to calm himself. He could turn on his power, but he wanted to see her with his own eyes for awhile longer. Squinting in the low light filtering through the cracks in his window shutters, he followed the curl of her dark hair over her cheeks and down to the edges of her lips.
The sound of her breathing continued to batter at him, however, and even the dim light was stabbing at his eyes. When he could no longer take it, he reached into himself and rode the ragged edge of her breathing to find his power.
His eyesight went dark, traded once more with Afterimage’s visceral feel of the world. With it, the warm glow of his skin chased away the shadows in the room. He purposely tempered his ability so as not to awaken her, but he could already sense her body shifting toward wakefulness. He listened to the rush of blood through her veins, the quickening beat of her heart, and the flux of fluid in her joints as they filled with inflammation. She moaned restlessly with discomfort. Her disability was returning as well.
Knowing that having her there would stress his disability, he found a pad of paper and scribbled a note. “Meet me in the sky. Lock the house when you go.” He left it on the nearby coffee table, weighing it down with a set of house keys. Then he went to his bedroom, dressed in fresh clothes, gathered his supplies in his fanny pack. He left the house and took off into the early morning air to find his place above the river.
As he waited, he scanned the city. He did not go through his list. Instead, he enjoyed the view as much as he was able with his abilities and waited.
Pressure caught up to him not long after. He hovered in the air, still as a morning star, as she looped about him before stopping a few short yards away. She came much closer than she had previously, making his senses tingle. From this distance it was difficult for him to tell where he ended and she began, their hearts beating a syncopated rhythm.
“Good morning,” she whispered so only he could hear. “I need to head home, but I thought I’d return your keys.” She held them out to him in her gloved hand.
Afterimage moved in slowly until the light of his body enveloped her. With his power covering her, he imagined how difficult it must have been not to flee, but she did not flinch.
Touching her hand, he placed his own over her fingers and curled them around the keys. Then he backed away to return to his original position.
Even behind her goggles, he could feel her eyes lingering on him. Her lips were pinched straight in thought, then slowly curved into a grin. “I’ll take that as an open invitation to visit.” She dropped the keys into one of the pockets of her suit. “I just need to check in with my brother and grab some food. I’ll see you shortly.” With a quick wave, she whisked away over the city toward home.
He followed her with his senses for a time, then returned to his vigil. Feeling more relaxed than he had in years, he watched and waited to see what would happen next.