Henry stumbled out of his apartment and into the hallway, a dark blot well over six feet tall, still shifting, changing shape. In flux. Milo stayed well back from Henry, but kept him in sight. The ghost of a man following the ghost of something perhaps more than a man. Perhaps nothing like a man at all.
Henry crashed down the stairs, bumping into a woman, knocking her flat. The man the woman was with narrowly sidestepped Henry’s blundering descent, turning and opening his mouth, thinking about saying something. But the man had no way of rationalizing what he’d just witnessed, so he closed his mouth, bent to help his girlfriend off the ground.
Milo floated past the couple, unseen.
When Henry reached the bottom of the staircase, he flung his massive arms at a door with an “Exit Only” sign hanging over it. The door crashed open, knocked against the cement wall behind it. He emerged into the parking garage of his apartment building, immediately fell to his knees, then rolled over onto his back. He let out a strangled cry from between steel, blackened lips. One of his legs kicked out convulsively, knocking out a low section of a nearby concrete pillar. Pieces sprinkled the front-left tire of a car parked in the closest stall. His other leg shot out, denting the same car’s driver-side door. He’d grown about half a foot overnight and, in places on his body where muscle and bone used to be, now metal existed, or at least something becoming metal.
Milo told Henry to calm down. Told him to take it easy. Relax. It’ll be alright. Just settle, man. It’ll pass. No worries.
But Henry couldn’t hear Milo – not that Milo knew if this convulsion would pass, anyway; they were just words of comfort for comfort’s sake – so Henry thrashed some more, took another small chunk out of the pillar, this time a little higher up.
Milo watched, fascinated as Henry took shape. His new shape.
When he rose again, his knees shook, clattered together. He reached one part-metal/part-flesh palm out to steady himself against the pillar he’d kicked.
Henry breathed in, breathed out. Slowly. Like great bellows. Chunks of shot poked from his ribs; tips of bullets littered one side of his face, both arms, most of his left leg; strips of smooth steel ran down both sides of his torso, glinting in the dim underground light.
Another breath, slow. The expansion of Henry’s chest caused a few bullets to dislodge from his body, clatter to the ground.
He turned his head a little. Eyes gray, nearly solid metal. Ball bearings set deep in his skull. Somehow seeing, collecting information.
Milo shivered as his friend’s eyes settled on him. But they did not see him – rather saw through him, behind him. Milo turned around.
A small boy and his mother stood at one of the exits. The mother’s keys rattled in one hand. Neither she nor the boy had yet looked up to see Henry. They held each other’s hands as they walked, the mother looking down at her son, the boy prattling on about some video game he’d been playing. The mother’s boots shattered the previous quiet; the boy filled the spaces between each heel’s connection with excited patter.
They passed very near to Milo; he smelled – or perhaps imagined he could smell – the woman’s perfume. Henry’s head tracked them as they strolled by, still not noticing him. Milo wondered what this new Henry would do if the mother and the boy looked up and saw him.
The mother’s car was opposite Henry and Milo, two rows over. She opened the passenger side for her son, sweeping her arm in front of her. “After you, m’dear,” she said, and laughed a little.
The boy giggled, got in the car. The mother closed the door. Crossed to the driver’s side, head still down, digging for something in her purse, smiling. Opened her own door, slipped inside. Slammed it shut.
Started the engine. Backed out.
And drove away.
Henry watched the car turn up a ramp, the engine sounds drifting farther and farther away. His neck relaxed, head drooping. A dandelion too heavy for its stalk.
“Henry,” Milo said. “Henry.”
But Henry just stared at his heavy, gray-black hand, still plastered against the pillar. And breathed.
Waiting for whatever came next.
Milo hovered nearby, of two minds about watching his friend go through another change. On the one hand, he wanted to be here for Henry – as physically ineffectual as he was; on the other, he didn’t want to witness again what he’d just seen: the mad thrashing, the roaring, the pained look on his face of a kind Milo could scarcely imagine – his face that was now beginning to look like something else’s face. What made it Henry was the way the body moved. Milo had run enough with his friend that they knew each other’s physical movements inside out. Henry had always been fluid, sleek. Even changing into whatever he was becoming, Milo saw that he had not lost that.
Henry gained control of himself, leaned against the car he’d bashed up, near the front-right wheel well. He examined his hybrid hands, moved them around in front of his face, rubbing them, clinking together fingers nearly the size of screwdriver handles. He held them up to his ear as he clinked, as if trying to figure out what they were made of.
What he was made of.
He knocked his deformed knuckles on the car’s panelling. Metal clanged loudly, reverberated off the wall. He tilted his head to one side, positioned one knuckle to stick out farther from his hand than the others. He raked it across the panel he’d just rapped against. A thin strip of paint curled under the pressure, flaked off, fell to the ground beside him.
Milo watched as Henry’s face contorted. Metal grating against metal. A Frankenstein’s monster of steel, patched together, forgotten before it was complete.
Move on, Henry, Milo thought. You can’t stay here forever. Someone’s gonna come down here and see you. Come on, brother, let’s go.
But Henry was fascinated with himself. Intrigued by his transformation.
He opened his mouth. A thin gray sliver about the width of a watchband slipped out from between his serrated lips: pink tongue mixed with gray metal. Henry bit down gently with iron-tombstone teeth, grimaced. Snaked his tongue back into his mouth.
A few minutes passed with Henry just staring ahead, breathing, perhaps feeling the power, the efficiency, of his new lungs. Milo heard doors slamming shut in the stairwell nearby.
Henry, please…
Henry stood up slowly, back bent. He opened his mouth again, this time looking as though he were trying to speak. He fish-gaped for a few seconds, then clamped his lips shut, closing his eyes, defeated, when nothing came out. Then he put one foot in front of the other – just like in his old life – and shuffled toward the exit ramp clumsily, nearly falling over several times.
Milo followed his friend out into the cold white of the storm. Followed him as his balance improved, his step became surer, his footing more solid. Followed him when others would run in the opposite direction. But Milo believed that a friend is a friend is a friend. And he soon saw that Henry had a purpose, a direction.
Henry stuck close to the sides of buildings, hunkered behind cars, dumpsters, anything big enough to hide him when people came into view. Though it would be hard for them to see him through the blowing snow, Milo knew Henry realized what he was – or if not what he was, he knew what he certainly did not appear to be: human. And yes, people somehow forgot their encounters with his kind, but how much of that was tied to the fact that they looked human? Would this mysterious force continue to work when people were confronted with a giant metal/human hybrid bumbling around their streets? Probably best not to find out.
The storm picked up, dumped layer after layer of crisp, crunchy snow under Henry’s feet. The sun dipped below the horizon. Gas lamps flickered on. Henry moved carefully down back alleys, crossed nearly deserted streets with special care not to get caught in the pools of thin yellow light from the lamps above.
As deeper darkness fell, Milo caught sight of a large blue “H” limned against the swirling white.
Where are you going, Henry? Milo thought, drifting above the snowy ground. What’s drawing you here? But then it hit him: Of course. The hospital. Faye.
Henry trudged across a muddy field, ducked under several trees with low-hanging branches as cars in the hospital parking lot drove by, their lights cutting conical swaths through the curtain of snow. Light shone out of one of the rooms on the first floor of the hospital. It bathed a patch of sidewalk a well-defined white, as if cut with scissors.
Without understanding where the thought came from, Milo found himself repeating, Henry, I’m here, I’m here, over and again in his head.
Henry moved away from the last tree he’d stuck himself against, headed toward the light from the room on the hospital’s first floor.
Milo followed Henry across the remaining patch of field, the snowflakes feeling colder than ever where they passed through him.