Joseph Williams was having a hell of a day. The University of Kansas freshman was desperate to set up his chemistry experiment. He couldn't believe he had waited until it was so close to the due date. At least his experiment was simple enough -- just caramelize sugar. All he had to do was heat some sugar and he'd be fine. Sure, it wasn't exactly an interesting idea for an experiment, but he couldn't imagine that his classmates had chosen anything much more creative.

Joe looked around him as he placed the bag of sugar on the chemistry lab's counter. Someone had forgotten to clean up the results of their own experiment, with a small puddle of chemicals being left on the counter. Well, if they hadn't cleaned it up, he wasn't going to do it for them. He poured the sugar into the metal pot he had placed on a burner. He added water to it and turned the burner on. Glancing at his phone, he reviewed the recipe for caramelized sugar he had looked up. He was using the "wet" method -- adding water to sugar -- because it wouldn't burn as fast. He placed his phone on another counter up against the wall, so he could get the video he needed of the caramelization process. The whole process would probably be about ten minutes long. He was already starting to get a nice syrup forming, at about 215 degrees Fahrenheit.

Joe sighed. He was dreading the grade he would get. Caramelizing sugar? That was the best he could come up with? He would be satisfied with a "C" at this point. He needed a smoke. He walked over to a window and opened, glancing back at the syrup to make sure it wasn't burning. By now, it had evolved from a syrup into a potential fudge, having reached 240 degrees.

Joe lit his cigarette and inhaled. He knew he shouldn't be smoking -- and he definitely shouldn't be doing it in a chemistry lab -- but the stress was getting to him. He was away from home for the first time in his life and he was scared. He hadn't made any friends (not that he would know how to in the first place), he hadn't even so much as held a girl's hand, and he was quickly finding out that maybe he wasn't as smart as he thought he had been in high school. The sugar was bubbling away, gaining the consistency of a caramel candy (but not the caramel he wanted) at 245 degrees.

Joe exhaled. Was it a mistake coming to this school? He was only eighteen years old and already in debt. And it wasn't like he was exactly skilled at science, he just couldn't think of anything else he wanted to do. While the caramel boiled into something almost like a marshmallow at 250 degrees, Joe inhaled again.

He couldn't get a job doing a trade. He wasn't suited for that kind of dirty manual labor. He didn't care how well it paid, it wasn't worth dying from a workplace injury before he was even married. Exhale. Married. Like that would ever happen at this rate. The marshmallow slime became a taffy at 270 degrees. Even next to the window, Joe was starting to sweat from the heat. He briefly looked back at his taffy, still being recorded, and drew his attention back towards his smoke. Inhale.

It's not like he was ever popular in high school. He wasn't exactly bullied, but he didn't have many friends, either. Usually, they were other outcasts, like him. Even back then, he didn't "make" friends -- it just kind of happened, somehow. Taffy into candy at 300 degrees. Exhale. The puddle of chemicals started to steam.

What a life. What a miserable life. No, not even miserable. Just boring. Ordinary. Even if he did graduate someday, it wasn't like he was going to be the world's greatest scientist. Inhale. His big idea for a project was something anyone with a kitchen could do. Candy into light caramel at 340 degrees. Steaming puddle into bubbling puddle. Exhale.

When he was a kid, he could never decide what he wanted to be. A director? A biologist? A paleontologist? An astronaut? Light caramel into medium caramel at 355 degrees. A zookeeper? Inhale. A superhero? Bubbling into boiling. Joe grimaced. Him, a superhero? Really? Sure, every boy wants to be one, but even at that age, he had to known he'd never be a superhero. Exhale.

Medium caramel into dark caramel at 375 degrees. Boiling puddle into noticeably smelly and toxic fumes. Shit. Joe ran over to the counter, trying to think of a way to get rid of the gas. He took off his lab coat, covered his mouth and nose with his shirt with one hand (still holding the cigarette), and tried to fan away the gas with the coat using his other hand. He hoped the smoke detector wouldn't go off. He could edit the video, but he couldn't live down the embarrassment of being so negligent he didn't clean up potentially flammable chemicals. Wait.

Flammable.

Wait.

The cigarette.

Burning ashes floated down from the cigarette, igniting the remains of the puddle. The fire quickly spread to his lab coat. He dropped it and quickly tried to put out the cigarette on the dry part of the counter. He turned around, smacking his arm into the pot. The pot tipped over. At 392 degrees, Joe's dark caramel had finally become black caramel, completing his experiment.

And now 392 degrees of hot sugar had just splashed onto his unprotected chest. Joe screamed in agony as the napalm-like substance melted its way into his skin, through his muscles. He was suddenly distracted by a sharp headache. Had he inhaled too much of the vapors? What even were those chemicals, anyway? Whatever they were, he had to find help.

Joe turned around to run to the door, only to collapse to his knees in pain. He saw steam coming from somewhere, and dimly realized that it was coming through his burning chest cavity. His blood was literally boiling. Tears began to roll down his face, only to boil away as his flesh bubbled and popped. The pain was everywhere now, even though only his chest had been hit. It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense. He could barely move. He was wrong. He wasn't fit to be a scientist. He just wanted to go home and spend the rest of his life in the safety of his bedroom at his parents' house. Why were his hands burning?

Slowly, Joe started to crawl towards the door. It was too hard to stand up. As Joe moved, he could feel the meat from his legs fall away, leaving a trail of human ground beef on the floor. Only now was the smoke detector finally beeping, but he couldn't hear it. His back was boiling away. The fat in his limbs was sizzling. It was just his chest, wasn't it? He opened his mouth to scream again, only to feel what was left of his nose fall onto his tongue.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

His vision was getting blurry. He tried to lift his arm and realized that there was some kind of brown substance dripping from his exposed bones. To his horror, he realized that it was caramelized sugar. Did some get on his arm?

He finally got to the door and reached towards the door handle. The relatively cool metal of the handle felt like heaven, a feeling which quickly turned to further horror as Joe saw his fingernails slowly fall to ground, suspended by nerves and blood vessels in strings of boiling syrup. His organs had to have been affected by this point, right? Why wasn't he dead yet? Was this a nightmare? Was he in Hell? Why had everything but his eyes boiled away?

Weakly, Joe managed to push the handle downwards, his hand slipping off and leaving behind some more grilled flesh on the handle. A crack of light and noise, almost as if he was at the gates of Heaven, filtered through between the door and the doorway. Joe used what was left of his strength to push the door open.

"HEL--" was all he could manage to say before he collapsed. His lungs and vocal chords had been burned to the point of rendering him nearly mute. He pushed himself up slightly and looked down at his chest, finding that his ribcage was exposed and that his heart -- despite it steaming like the rest of him -- was still beating. Joe fell again, deciding to close his eyes and just let it end. His final thought before he passed out was the realization that it didn't hurt anymore, but only because his nerve endings had burnt off.

"Mr. Williams?"

Joe slowly regained consciousness. The pain was still gone, but everything was dark. Was he blind?

"Mr. Williams, can you hear me?"

He could. He tried to open his mouth, but he couldn't. He realized that it actually was open, but he couldn't close it -- something was covering it.

"Mr. Williams, please try to move if you can hear me."

The man's voice was soothing, a guide in the blackness. Was he hallucinating? He vaguely remembered the music video for Metallica's "One." What was that movie they used? "Johnny Got His Gun" or something like that? Was that what the rest of his life would be like? Or was he already dead? Was God calling him? But that's what Johnny thought, too, right? Joe had briefly looked up the movie's plot after watching the video.

Joe decided to follow God's orders. He managed to weakly shudder.

"Good, you're awake. You were in an accident. Don't worry, we're taking you somewhere where you can get better. Well, relatively speaking. Your life's not in any danger, but...well, you don't look too good right now."

He really was alive? Then who was God?

"Listen, my name is Agent Ortiz. I'm with the federal government. Don't worry, you're not in trouble. But you can't go home, okay?"

What?

"Your accident was fairly normal, but the effects...well, they weren't. You noticed it, didn't you? Only your chest was hit by the caramelized sugar, but the rest of your body burned as well."

That's right. It did, didn't it?

"You felt a headache, didn't you?"

Joe tried to make some kind of noise.

"Oh, right. Let's see if we can get that off."

Joe felt something being removed from his mouth. He could breathe much better and move his mouth, but speaking was still difficult.

"Wha...how?"

"Interesting. You seem to be recovering at a remarkable rate. Of course, you likely won't resemble anything like a person anytime soon, but I imagine you'll be able to talk and move just as well as you used to. I guess that's part of it."

"Par..of...wha?"

"Part of your...abilities, if you can call it that. Tell me, Joe, do you know what a retrovirus is?"

"Retro..."

"It's a type of virus that's encoded into the human genome. They're usually harmless, but sometimes, certain stressful events can activate one retrovirus in particular. We call it 'Proteus.'"

Agent Ortiz ripped off whatever was covering Joe's eyes. When his eyes adjusted, he could see that Ortiz was holding a chunk of hard caramelized sugar, with pieces of flesh attached to it. There was another chunk by Ortiz's feet, which had previously covered Joe's mouth. Luckily, nothing had covered Joe's nose -- or rather, the slits that used to be his nose. Joe could finally see that he was strapped to a gurney and hooked up to an IV. Ortiz, a man in a black suit and wearing sunglasses, was sitting beside him.

"That's better, isn't it? You see, Joe, Proteus affects all of you "Retrohumans" differently, hence the name. Proteus was a Greek god of the sea who could shapeshift into many different forms, you see. I'll admit, your power is one of the more...frankly, disgusting ways I've seen it manifest."

Joe glanced around him. He was in a van with a black interior. Someone in another suit was driving. This wasn't an ambulance. Where the fuck was he going?

"Relax, I've had medical training. But like I've said, your condition isn't as serious as it looks. As I was saying, Retrohumans are something we've known about for centuries. Every government does. We all use them, but nobody says shit. We can't just admit that you guys are running around out there, right? All of our science, our culture, our politics, our history -- I mean, can you even begin to imagine the kind of chaos there would be if people knew we were using soldiers with superpowers? We'd have to rewrite every textbook in the world! Trust me, you don't even want to know what we really dropped on Japan in '45."

"Super..."

"Yes, Joe. Superpowers. Like yours. Remember what I said about your whole body burning? It turns out that your sweat glands are somehow secreting caramelized sugar. I imagine the fire made that a whole lot worse. Honestly, Joe, you are one lucky bastard. I've seen people literally explode the second their retro powers activate."

"Sup..er..."

"Jesus, you're out of it, aren't you? Must be the morphine, but I doubt you really need it. Your nerve endings are just straight up gone, kid. I don't think they're coming back, either. Your dick's not in terrible shape, but..." Ortiz laughed. "Well, anyway, I bet you have a lot of questions. Like, 'Where am I going?' 'Where's my family?' 'Is this legal?' Shit like that. But for now, let's say that we're bringing you to your new home."

"Nuh..."

"Here's the deal, Joe. The rest of the world thinks you're dead. You are now a tragic victim of a typical school shooting. What can I say, Joe? You made a pretty big scene crawling out of that lab. We had to make one of our own to cover it up. Let's just say you're not the only victim of that shooting."

Joe was silent. He was thinking about his situation. Had they really killed people just to abduct him?

"In case you're wondering, the shooter was one of our guys. Your chemistry professor, actually. Small world, right? He always knew he'd have to die for his country, but I doubt he thought it would be like this."

It finally occurred to Joe that his family thought he was dead. He would never see them again. He started to cry again.

"Looks like your tear ducts are growing back. Thinking about your parents? Don't worry, Joe. Uncle Sam's your family, now."

Ortiz grinned.

"Starting today, kid...you're a superhero."