––––––––
I straightened my back out, bringing my hips under me, and completed my final deadlift rep. After a two-second hold, I quickly lowered the weight, relishing the clanging of the plates as they landed on the platform.
A dull, throbbing ache consumed my shoulders and back.
I roared like a lion. King of the iron jungle.
Too bad no one was around to bask in my glory.
AC/DC blared over the gym’s sound system, Brian Johnson wailing about kicking someone’s ass. No matter what decade, good ol’ AC/DC couldn’t be beat when it came to lifting music.
I rolled my engorged shoulders, enjoying the pump that inflated them. There was nothing like a good workout to make my problems feel small and inconsequential, even if just for a few minutes.
Some stiffness remained in the shoulder I’d taken buckshot in not too long ago, but I couldn’t complain too much. Considering what everyone else had gone through, I’d gotten off easy.
Drew had partially degloved his hand while escaping a pair of handcuffs during the madness that was Arthur’s Creek. We’d been held captive by a town full of people whose minds were mangled into a psychotic mess, and our end had been rapidly approaching when Detective Andrew Lloyd had decided to go full badass.
Without so much as a whimper, Drew had pulled his hand through the cuffs, removing vast swaths of skin in the process, and took out a madman who was about to kill us.
The shiny flesh on his wrist had healed for the most part, but he hadn’t recovered full use of his hand yet. The surgeon who tried to put him back together said the nerve damage was severe. He couldn’t promise Drew that he would ever be the same again.
The dexterity in Drew’s fingers had gone to shit for a while. The palm of his hand tingled constantly. But slowly and surely, he’d worked his way close to normalcy again. He still couldn’t lift weights, which had him lagging far behind me in the strength department.
It wasn’t like he could ever keep up with such a hulking mass of testosterone anyway, but now he had zero chance. And through all of that shit, I’d never heard him bitch about it. Not once. He was the toughest SOB I’d ever met.
Other than me, of course.
Allison had been sliced up like a fillet of fish. I hadn’t seen her since that day, but Drew had looked her up a few days ago and found that she was recovering nicely. From what he said, she’d even weaned off the sauce a bit.
I wished her well. With any luck, she could lead a semblance of a normal life again.
We hadn’t heard anything from Jimbo. He’d taken a large, monetary settlement from the government and split town. Couldn’t blame him there. I would have done the same thing if given the choice.
And then there was Sammy.
She’d paid the ultimate price.
And it was all your fault, she whispered in my ear.
I grimaced, shook my head.
As Sammy died in my arms, I’d gone deep into her mind. Our personalities, our memories, our consciousness had intertwined in a way that I’d never experienced before. Unfortunately, that Vulcan Mind Meld had brought a piece of her back with me.
To say that she was less than thrilled would be an understatement.
No one could have witnessed the horrors that we had and not been fundamentally changed. Some things stuck with you forever. Some things pulled you out into deep water and tried to drown you.
We’d all been running from our own personal demons since that day in West Virginia. It turned out that my demon was a woman who tried to save me, who had given her life because she wanted to make me a better man.
So yeah, I felt as guilty as a whore in church. Assuming they would feel guilty, that was.
I bent down, picked up a gallon jug of water, and downed a few inches of it.
Went to the pull-up bar, started banging out reps like a boss.
Your strength will fail you. Just like it failed me.
I grunted in the middle of a rep, kept going.
Anger blossomed in my mind.
The image of a demented doctor standing over Allison, slicing into the flesh between her exposed breasts, flitted through my mind. I remembered her screams, her blood, her fear.
A growl escaped my throat as I did another pull-up.
More grotesque memories filled my vision: Butch popping heads like melons with his hammer, a woman planting a severed head in her flower garden, a belt made of tongues.
My anger boiled into fury.
I let go of the bar, dropped to the floor. My chest heaved, back ached. Blood pumped through my hands as I worked them open and closed, open and closed.
A heavy bag hung from the ceiling in the corner of the gym. I stalked over to it and hammered away at it with a barrage of punches. The bag hadn’t been used much, and it was stiff as hell. My wrists weren’t wrapped and my hands didn’t have gloves on them. Only an idiot would hit a heavy bag without any kind of protection.
I didn’t care. I threw bombs at the bag, channeling my energy into my fists. Guessed that made me an idiot.
My knuckles split.
Blood smeared on the bag, pattered to the floor.
I punched harder, faster.
The jug of water on the floor to my right began to vibrate. The gym mats under it were sluiced with water from the open top. Small weight plates on the deadlift bar rattled.
A chain hanging from a hook on the wall clanged.
I finally stopped pounding on the bag and stared at my bleeding knuckles.
Took deep breaths.
Focused on relaxing.
My fury slowly abated. The movement around me subsided. I regained control of myself little by little, willing my mind to calm.
After everything stopped clattering around me, a piercing headache formed behind my eyes. That always happened after I had a bout of rage followed by my weird telekinetic shit. It felt like an instantaneous migraine set in.
Wooziness overcame me as I stood there, and I had to grab onto the heavy bag to keep from falling over. I swayed on my feet for a few seconds, fighting against the pull of unconsciousness.
The urge to vomit settled in my stomach. My vision blurred.
“Ash-hole?” a small voice called from overhead. “You still in the gym, butt pirate?”
Nami. She was using the intercom system to give me shit while I was seconds away from passing out. What a nice girl.
She paused for a second, though I could still hear a slight hiss coming from the speakers. She still had the mic keyed. Whenever the intercom was active in the gym, a microphone in the ceiling automatically kicked on. It saved meatheads like me from having to go across the room to a console to talk. All I had to do was speak and she could hear me.
I was just a little preoccupied at the moment.
“I don’t hear any plates banging around,” she said. “Oh God, you aren’t rubbing one out in there, are you? I know you love those weights, Ash-hole, but they can’t love you back. We’ve discussed this before. Just because you rub your di—”
“What do you want, Short Round?” I grumbled. My vision had begun to clear.
“I can wait until you finish. Can’t imagine it takes that long.”
“Just tell me what you want.” My teeth were grinding. “I’m a little busy right now.”
“I know you are. That’s why I said I’d wait. I can hear you grunting in there. It’s gross.”
“I’m going to punt you like a football when I see you.”
Nami laughed. “Dude, I’d pimp slap you so hard that—”
“Get to the point, Short Round.” Most of my symptoms had finally eased up. Only the piercing headache remained. That would last for a good hour or so. Lucky me.
“Someone is extra pissy this morning,” Nami huffed. “I need you up here in the lab.”
“For what?”
“I need a test dummy. Emphasis on dummy.”
“I’ll be there in twenty. Gotta shower first.”
“Thank sweet baby Cthulhu for that.” Nami switched off the comm system, and AC/DC came back through the speakers.
I reached down, grabbed my water. Poured some over my face. Toweled it off after a few seconds. My anger had teetered on the edge of being uncontrollable the past few weeks. If I didn’t get it wrangled into some semblance of restraint, I feared that my head might explode one of these days.
The idea that I could move things with my mind would have excited me not too long ago. Now that the consequences of using my newfangled ability pounded in my head like a bass drum, I didn’t want anything to do with it.
Grabbing my stuff, I turned the music off and headed to my room.