Jack had lived. Or rather, his body did. The person who'd existed before that final shot took the freak bounce to end all bounces had perished at the instant the ball had gone through the basket, and his soul was buried with his family.
He didn't remember everything from that night, not from the moment of first discovery on. Not while he was awake, and seldom anything like a continuous progression. Little snips of film played across the screen, broke up and ran off the edges.
His sister's corpse. His parents. The blood, because whoever had killed his parents hadn't stopped at a choking. Someone had called the police and it hadn't been him, because his phone had only reconnected to the network -- later. Once. He'd seen the first bar and then slung it into a wall.
Who had called the police? Probably the same people who'd killed his family, because police were required. It was part of the process, letting him watch as they freely roamed around his house, on the last night he would ever be there. He got to listen to all the crude jokes they made about the bodies, starting with how it would have been nice if his sister had been a little older so they'd have a more fun view. He was allowed to watch as they freely pocketed things in the declared name of evidence and open purpose of acquisition. He was forced to stay in the area under heavy guard, with hands moving to the grips of weapons every time he moved, as they laughed and smiled and cared about nothing more than the pain they were inflicting, just before they lied about getting everything down to the station and starting the hunt for the killers immediately. He was still waiting for immediately to begin.
They had come not to help, but to show him how helpless he was. That was their job --
-- but there had been one...
That officer had stood out. Part of it was the lack of uniform. The heavy coat which took its place, stained around cuffs and bottom edges, wouldn't have been missed anywhere, especially with the lingering smell. The man was overweight, poorly-shaven, bad-mannered, stomped about in a perpetual anger which didn't seem to have any direction to it, true expression somehow shadowed under the tiny brim of what Jack had eventually learned was called a porkpie hat, which seemed appropriate to someone whose tiny dark eyes could best (if insultingly) be described as piggy. A slovenly mess of humanity with a presence which seemed to have been manufactured for the counter of a butcher shop, moving in a heavy tread which never went into the blood. He'd been the one who escorted Jack out of the house for the last time. He'd insisted on it. And with all the others already back in their cars -- he'd spoken, just once.
"I'll remember their names," the gruff voice had softly grunted. "I remember all the names. Just in case there's ever a goddamn day when I get to do something for them."
(It had been months before he'd learned the man's name. And after that, it had been mere hours before the chemicals had risked using a burner phone to speak with Harv for the first time.)
He'd been taken to the orphanage. (Other places had foster home programs. The city still went with orphanages, and mainly used the term because it was marginally more polite than calling them prisons.) The gates had swung shut behind him, and...
There had been a funeral, with no need to ask who had paid for it: certainly charity extended to covering the final needs of three people whose last night alive had allowed them to witness the winning shot. A dark limousine parked at the far side of the cemetery. There might have been someone inside, watching. It might have just been a reminder. Either way, no one ever emerged.
Jack had... drifted. His body had moved down streets which were no longer his. Sometimes it did things like taking swings at a stupid man who'd tried to reassure him with a stat line, and that got him kicked off the team. No one was keeping his grades up for him, and doing any work himself seemed pointless. A lot of things seemed pointless, starting with breathing.
He woke up every day in the little bedroom which only looked everything like a cell, and after opening his eyes, he would spend at least half a minute trying to figure out where he was. Sometimes his nose would pull in phantom scents, because there was a practice later and his mother liked to carbo-load him with pancakes, ones which had been made from scratch, he had to get up because his sister was probably already tying up the bathroom and that was her loss because it would let him be first to the pancakes...
There was a while when Jack lived for those precious seconds of confusion. For those scant dreams when he was at the dinner table after losing the big game and they were telling him it would be all right. Moments when fantasy blurred at the edges and it seemed that with just a little more effort, reality would do the same.
He barely talked to anyone, not that he had anyone who wanted to talk with him any more, because it turned out that he'd never had any friends. He'd had teammates, and -- now he wasn't part of the team.
He couldn't seem to cry. Anger eventually became inaccessible, and caring quickly followed. He never, ever laughed.
The dead remained the dead, and nothing would bring them back. There had been pain, confusion, fear, desperation, and -- perhaps that had been followed by eternal reward. Maybe there had been nothing. In the rare times when he could focus on the thought, Jack didn't think nothing was such a bad option. To simply -- stop, and not even have anything left which could know that an end had happened at all.
To die was to feel pain once. It was a single ending, and once it had come, there was nothing left which would concern those it had come to. But Jack went through the pain every day, for he had lived, and it took very little time for him to realize that it was the central aspect of his punishment. That he would have to go on, until the moment he could not. And with every breath he continued to take, even without a reason for allowing breath to happen, the agony would begin anew.
He wondered if he was going insane.
Then he began to long for it.
He'd been picking out a means of death.
Ideally, he wanted to do some damage on his way out. The perfect exit would have been one that took him along for the ride, but Jack had no idea how to actually do that. Getting into the Foundation -- his picture was probably on file somewhere, with facial recognition software alerting the entire building at the moment he stepped through the doors. An attack on the residence seemed slightly more impossible. He would be lucky to do so much as shove a minor functionary in front of a bus in time for it to hit them both and with his rather dubious luck, Jack might just live through the impact. Add in the odds of his getting anyone who'd been in his house that night, and... all he'd probably wind up doing was committing murder. His family had become involved because of something he'd done --
happened
-- and killing those who hadn't directly taken part in their deaths seemed to make him just as bad, although it was becoming increasingly more difficult to remember just why that was wrong.
He'd looked for the blood-eyed man, and found him waiting in dreams.
He probably couldn't reach anyone. He could very loudly accuse, and that might bring an ending. If all else failed, he could certainly reach a bridge. A rooftop. Or there was traffic. There was almost always traffic, unless someone had closed a road down to create a private conference, and most of it was moving fast enough to end him.
His body drifted through the world, and what seemed to be left of his mind waited to see where the final stop would take place.
Jack had almost drifted all the way up to the entrance of his school when he saw the car.
He'd been leaving for school earlier and earlier, too early for much of anyone to really be there. It was a reason to leave the orphanage, and it put him outside the main building just in time to see the two large men getting out of the vehicle. One had a hastily-tied package under one arm and a major huff on his face. The other was simply carrying about two hundred pounds of attitude, and there was no question about who they worked for.
Jack didn't form any plans at the moment he saw them, and there wasn't much left in him which could still try. He made no attempt to introduce either man to the next car which came into the lot. He simply saw that two whose employer could never be in doubt (taking up three parking spaces with one vehicle was a major clue) were heading into his school, he imagined them going into his house, and he followed.
He kept his distance, and neither man ever saw him. Jack had been progressively fading and in any case, it was rather difficult to perceive fine details when peering through a heavy mist of red.
They'd gone into the building: so had he. Up to the science labs, and then they'd stormed through one door, the only one with a light on because there was a giant nerd within who had a place to work in the Foundation, another yet-unknown one within the lowest level of his house, and still came to school too early in the morning because there were somehow things he was only working on there and they needed their share of his attention.
It was just possible to hear the small gasp from the lab's occupant. It was much easier to hear the recovery.
"Gentlemen," the nerd said. "Can I help you?"
"You," one of them replied -- he decided it was the one carrying the package, because he then heard the oof! as it was shoved into the thin chest "-- can fix this."
Jack heard the student stagger back, the little rattle of beakers from the impacted table.
"What's wrong with it?" Forced, near-desperate calm. Not understanding what was wrong and just starting to recognize how much more wrong things could become. "What is it?"
"The skinsuit," the second voice said. "Your fucking chemical forensic investigation skinsuit!"
Brief silence was followed by the sounds of paper ripping. "The vials are here," the nerd finally said, forced calm somehow holding. "One set, anyway. And one of the proof-of-concept masks." More tearing. "But none of the testing masks. Is that the part which needs fixing?"
The shout was abrupt, and the fist Jack heard hitting the lab table added all the punctuation required. "The whole fucking thing needs fixing! You weren't at the fucking test, dumbass! You didn't see what happened when we let your stuff loose!"
"...they did a test?" the nerd just barely got out. "I was supposed to be at any --"
"Works fine!" the first voice yelled. "Does just what you said it would! The chemicals hit, and skin doesn't shed dead cells! Hairs won't let go! Mask won't come off! Everything turns into something which either doesn't leave evidence or looks like nothing else in the world!"
"That was what he asked for," the nerd managed. "Something which would help the police. No more contaminated crime scenes. No bulky suits which no one could really move in. Chemical retention of some potential disruption, marker tags on the rest. And the early testing made it look like everything was working --"
"You weren't fucking there! You didn't see their skin change! You didn't hear them laugh!"
And the nerd, who was very smart in some ways and very stupid in others, said exactly the wrong confused, desperate words.
"Animals don't laugh."
Jack heard the thin body slam into the wall.
"Fix it," the louder voice. "Fix the fucking thing. No more laughing maniacs who take too much to put down. No crazy hitting like a goddamn truck and moving faster than we could tackle. Nothing which takes two taser hits and keeps on coming. Find out why it's going wrong and fix it."
They started towards the door. Jack's drifting body somehow located a moment of focus and put him into the shadow of an alcove, out of sight.
"...there were three proof masks," the nerd somehow risked, for no reason Jack understood. Not on that day. "Where -- where are the other two?"
The second man laughed.
"The dump. Where they belong."
The dump.
"The... dump?"
Both men ignored the question. The nerd had come to the city (been lured?) just a few years ago, and so he didn't know the answer. But Jack had been a resident for a lifetime. He knew exactly what they were talking about. He knew where.
They left. Jack pressed himself deeper into darkness.
"Idiot," the first man declared.
"Boss picked that idiot," the second reminded his partner. "Maybe you shouldn't have been so rough on him."
"He messed up. He's gotta learn the price for that. Everyone's gotta understand. Can't make mistakes like that. And what's he gonna do?" Muttering now, "Strong, fast, laughing freaks... that homeless asshole nearly killed me before Circus Act got that shot off."
"Good thing he reached us," the second mused. "I don't know how we would have stopped them..."
They left. But Jack remained in the alcove. Body still, but with thoughts suddenly racing.
Moving at the speed of madness.
The nerd had put the retied package in his locker: Jack had watched the action from a distance. And then he'd left it alone. Because the nerd had the stuff in his locker, and if Jack broke into the locker (which he was sure he could do easily, he'd had enough fun planting surprises for his lessers in the days before), then there would be a time when everyone would know just where it had gone missing from and... he would live. The nerd would live, and Jack wanted him to have the family-intact life of someone who hadn't taken any direct blame. Because there was a chance that if anyone went into the locker, it would ultimately be decided that the loss had been the nerd's fault --
-- but anyone could go to the dump if they knew roughly where it was (where it was supposed to be), and it could take a lifetime in the city to gain that awareness. Anyone who didn't care about the consequences if they were spotted. Jack qualified on both counts.
He'd waited, somehow. Gotten to the end of the school day, gone back to the orphanage before curfew kicked in. It had taken only minutes to finally recognize a means of getting out, especially with the sun down and no one really paying attention to the windows which opened over the dumpster. Then it was striding through the night, hoodie pulled low and clinched around his face, staying in the shadows.
At some point after that, he'd reached the outer edge of the dump.
You heard rumors about the dump, if you lived in the city long enough. You would hear about the auto yard where so many collectors liked to scavenge for old parts, and the section out behind the ancient Chevys where no one ever went. Men brought things in there, and nothing ever came out. Things didn't go to the dump for recycling. They went there to vanish.
The answers to a hundred mysteries were supposed to be in that dump and if anyone got caught searching for a single one of them, the solution to their murder would make it a hundred and one.
Jack... hadn't been sure. It had sounded like a fantasy more than anything else. There had supposedly been an old movie theater, and then it had been torn down to make way for an auto salvage yard, which had meant taking out most of the neighborhood around it. That was crazy enough to begin with. But to have a special place in the center, just for making things vanish... for starters, there had to be better spots for such things than that. More isolated. Secure. But then, the central security might have been in everyone knowing just who owned it.
The dump was an urban legend, if that word could apply to nightmare. You could make jokes about it in safety, wishing your homework would wind up there, perhaps next to the teacher who'd assigned it. But to go looking for it was madness. It was the act of someone who was just that desperate, didn't care any more, and -- it seemed as if Jack still qualified.
Had it taken hours to reach the fence? With the size of the city, traveling on foot, it just might have. But it was still night, he was there, the gloves were slipped on and an athletic body went up and over, pushing off a too-close wall in order to vault the coils of barbed wire.
It was a hard landing, but not a noisy one. There were probably dogs who could have scented him and with the way the wind just happened to be blowing, none of them ever did. No two-legged guard spotted him as he moved, keeping his tread soft as he walked on top of the stacked cars. A dozen times when he could have fallen, at least three where a pile might have collapsed under him.
The strange attention of fortune which had seemingly focused on a single shot might have been on him again that night, everything going right just long enough to take him into a place where everything could potentially go wrong.
He never should have gotten in without being caught. He never should have made it past dogs, guards, and cameras. He never should have found it.
He did.
It was smaller than advertised.
There was a hollow. It wasn't at the exact center of the salvage yard: the actual site was a little more to the left. One part of the stories turned out to be true, because there was a wall of Chevys blocking the majority of access. No one had mentioned the human outlines carved into the ground in front of them.
Jack had looked at them for a few seconds. One hollow had the shape of an adult male. The other was a woman. Both vacancies had been placed about ankle-deep into the asphalt. He didn't understand, and just then, he didn't care. A little further, and then...
There were -- things. That might have been the single best way to describe them, especially for someone who'd never really cared about the literature part of his English classes. A hollow dug deep into the earth, with things in it. Some were metal, others were plastic, and practically all seemed to be broken. Random pieces of technological debris tossed from the Foundation's laboratories, never to be seen again. It still felt like a strange place to dispose of such items, and Jack still didn't care. He'd just carefully climbed down, been careful not to cut himself on any edges because his body would need to be intact for the brief approaching period just before it stopped being anything at all --
-- what am I doing?
He didn't care.
Why am I doing this?
Because he'd lived.
Life was pain. Life was madness. Life was punishment.
Jack dug. He wasn't sure what he was digging for and, with the certainty that came from delusion, he was equally sure he'd know it when he saw it.
His right hand went below what seemed to be a recently-shifted piece of metal, and his palm cupped the plastic-covered bulge of the first dead man's chin.
The human body changed when it died, and those changes broke the chemical bond. He didn't know that yet, didn't understand why the mask had come loose. He simply saw that the wrapping of the plastic had dislodged it, somewhat to the right. That had meant shifting the body, and he'd learned the true meaning of dead weight -- but doing so had exposed the box.
It was a fold-out box, with little shelves inside, much like something which could be used to store fishing tackle
Dad loved fishing
-- only the shelves were riddled with holes. Some of those holes still held intact vials.
He inspected them under the thin light of his phone's flash function. They were labeled. He couldn't make heads or tails out of the chemical names (most of which had been invented just months before), but there was a little plain English here and there. Like the part under the green swirling stuff which said Application.
Freeing the mask meant going through layer after layer of plastic. Unwinding that which blocked scent from the world. Touching the dead. But he'd done that already, when he'd cupped his sister's face between his hands.
Eventually, he had it all. He finished just as the sky was starting to show the first signs of approaching sun, violet night beginning to take on the first tinges of lighter blue. The mask was in his hands. He had the vial. And...
mask beats the facial recognition stuff
Not that it was much of a mask. Formless white plastic from one side, the world's thinnest gas protector on the other. He'd already checked and found he could see through it perfectly, at least from the proper side. The whole thing smelled faintly of a dead man's last application of aftershave. They would have let the victim shower and shave, before putting him into the human test. It kept things clean.
strong and fast, maybe I could get in, reach him before I
it won't work
it's crazy
it's crazy and I'm going to do it anyway because that way I'll have done something and
I'm going to die
Mom's dead. Dad's dead. Luanne's dead.
Jack's dead.
He pressed the mask against his face, not entirely sure what was supposed to happen next. Smoothed the contours with one hand: the other was holding a vial. Took a breath through the filters, found the only thing he could smell was the aftershave and
it smelled like his father's
and he was being pushed on a swing and his mother was cheering him from the stands and he was getting ready to dunk his sister in the public pool which was just fine because she was getting ready to do the same to him and they were eating dinner together and laughing and he missed them he missed them he missed them there were so many beds in that orphanage filled in the same way with all of the residents afraid to speak with each other and someone had to do something and
his left hand clenched, forced into movement by the surge of memory and pain.
Crushed the vial.
In the end, it was all about that first exposure.
There was a chemical quality to emotions, for the feelings themselves were ultimately chemical in nature. The limbic system was one of the body's internal factories. Every emotion has a signature which can be writ small in molecules. The exact form of the chemical balance in the subject's body at the moment that experimental, unready-for-humans handiwork first entered it would forever after determine the nature of every future interaction.
The homeless men, forced to subject themselves to the unknown, had been fearful, and so that which took their bodies for its own had reacted. But the teenager, at the moment the balance began to shift, had been filled with memory. Agony and regret, pain and desire for what could no longer be had. A desperate wish that such would never happen again to anyone else. Loss and love.
The animals who should have been tested were incapable of experiencing the full convolutions of that mix. In the last moments before their skin took in new agents, the men who had been killed only knew fear. But Jack, vision fading during the original seconds of transition, the inner stage yet to be fully built, simply felt a warmth. The comforting grip of phantom arms around his body, quickly overlapping the flesh ones just before they settled in.
It was all about the first exposure, and Jack didn't know that. It would be a long time before he even began to suspect. All he felt in those first/last moments was warmth. A warmth matched by the voice rising from within.
A bundle of chemicals knelt in a pit next to a dead man's body, borrowed eyes closed, and felt its first thoughts still echoing within something which seemed to be a newly-born mind.
It'll be okay.
I'll take care of everything.
And then it began to laugh.