“YOU’RE LETTING me out, right?” I asked. “I know you are. The press is skewering you. You’ll be sorry you ever did this!” I shouted defiantly.

“I’ll be back, and you’ll be sorry!” one of the stone-face guards squeaked, mocking the way my voice cracked. They brought me down another corridor, pushing me into a room where I had to sit in a chair at a table. The room had one overhead fluorescent bulb. The table was metal and painted black. There was a camera on a tripod in the corner. The guards seemed frightened of the room, treating it gingerly. They didn’t want to spend more time in it than they had to, for work’s sake. They stayed in the hall while I moldered inside.

I heard the noise of footsteps clacking down the hall, and a tall, thin man wearing a long red robe swept into the room. He was flanked by a much shorter man in a dark black robe. The guards took that as their cue to leave. “We’ll be back in an hour,” one of them said.

“I’ll need one of you to stay. They requested film,” said the black robe. He looked like a sidekick, short and stout compared to red robe.

“I thought they didn’t want any record of this,” the guard said.

“This tape is for a very special person,” the man in the black robe replied.

“What are you going to do? Why are you filming this? Who the hell are you?” I shouted. It was time for these men to know that I existed. That there was a person in the balance.

The man in the red robe raised his hand toward me and the next words I was going to say died in my throat. My mouth sealed shut. I tried to open it but couldn’t. I felt it and I had no mouth. Just smooth skin. I shouted but a loud MMMMM just echoed in my esophagus.

“I’ll cover you on Tuesday if you take this,” one guard said.

“Fine,” he replied, and his compatriot ran out before he could change his mind. The guard walked over to the camera and flipped the switch to on. His hands were shaking.“Hello Sarah,” the man in the black robe said. “So nice to meet you. My name is Onyx Rivers and this is my friend Phobetor. He doesn’t say much.” Phoebeter nodded. “I’m here to make a movie with you. I do this type of work to serve my country. I’ve been informed that you are a terrorist and supervillain and I want to make sure you have no plans, already in action, that could harm people.”

“Now speak,” Onyx said, and Phoebeter made a line with his finger across my mouth.

“I swear. I’m just a kid. I have no evil plans. I don’t know why you think this. I’m innocent. I’m…”

“I was hoping you’d be more cooperative,” he said. He looked at Phoebeter, who proceeded to run his finger backward and my mouth disappeared again. “But, let’s be honest, I was hoping you’d say that.” Phoebeter held his hands up and my chair tilted backwards and hovered above the ground a few inches. Onyx Rivers walked up to my side and indicated for the man with the camera to follow him. Onyx looked down at me. “I’m not completely unlike you, young Ms. Robertson. I too was considered a Misshape for most of my early life. But I knew my powers were great. But there is a difference between the two of us. I chose to use mine for good, whereas you and your family have chosen the less righteous path.”

I tried to shout at him to tell him he was wrong, but I couldn’t scream. I had no mouth. I thrashed, wildly, trying to tell him the truth, but my hands were pinned to the table, and starting to hurt as they stretched out, unable to move with my body.“Would you like to know what those powers were?” he asked. “The ones I had to show were extraordinary.”

I nodded no, emphatically.

“Oh don’t be shy. Sure you do,” he said. “Everyone does.” He made a circle with his right hand, held it up to his mouth, and blew through it. A large bubble appeared, like a soap bubble, and floated upward from his hand. He then made small puffs and tiny bubbles emerged from his hand. “You see, people thought I wasn’t good for anything but party tricks. My guidance counselor suggested I become a clown for children’s parties. But my power isn’t making bubbles. It’s making foams. And everyone around me was too stupid to be able to teach me the power such foams held.”

He put his hands together and slowly spread them apart. As he did, a meshwork of tiny bubbles, like you’d see in a soap bucket at a car wash, appeared. But when he moved his hands, instead of slipping off or popping, they followed the path of his hand—which unfortunately, was going toward my face. He took a long strip off bubbles and pulled them across my nose, covering it. Panic shot through my body. My eyes opened wide. I couldn’t breathe.

He pinched his forefinger and thumb together on both hands, and created bubbles that expanded and contracted as he spoke. “You see, foam is just air trapped in a thin liquid membrane. The liquid can be anything and the membrane can be anything. You can separate explosives gases from each other by a micron of water, or smoke, so people can’t see. In your case, what’s being trapped in those bubbles in oxygen. Not all of it, but just enough to keep you conscious.”

He looked at Phoebeter who made my mouth appear again, and I screamed for him to stop but a layer of foam muffled the sound. Onyx River pulled out a pin and popped one of the bubbles and a small scream emerged. My scream. He continued to pop bubbles, and tiny screams burst with them. I was on the verge of passing out when he put his hand on my bubble mask and a rush of oxygen came into my lungs. “You see? Very useful.” I nodded. “Now, do you have anything useful for me?”

I wanted to tell him anything to make him stop. “What? What do you want?” I said. “I don’t know anything. If I did, I’d tell you.”

“Hmm. Better trained than I thought,” he said, and then he lifted my chair back up. “Well maybe my friend will have more luck with you.”

Onyx stepped back and joined the cameraman and Phoebeter stepped forward. He made a strange gesture with his hands, drawing them upward, and my hands followed them, like I was his marionette. He placed them on the table with his invisible strings and they felt bolted to the table. Then he placed his hands on my temples and disappeared. Then the room disappeared with him. A blinding white light flashed in my eyes and I closed them tightly to block it out. When I opened them up I was in my bed at home. I blinked twice and rubbed my eyes.

As I got out of bed, something felt strange about my room. Everything was where it should be, my humidifier on the desk, my books piled up against the wall, my emergency rain bucket by the bed, but they all seemed, I’m not sure how to put this, aged. Like they had been untouched for years. There were some cobwebs inside the humidifier, a patina of rust on various metal objects like my chair, and wooden things like my desk and bedframe were slightly rotted. It wasn’t extreme, just slight enough to be noticeable. The light in the room was also weird. Like all the warm tones had been blotted out and the world was gray and blue.

I went downstairs but the house was empty. Dirty dishes piled up in the sink. It smelled acrid. The windows were broken and weeds and plants grew into the house. The carpet was damp. The TV broken. There was graffiti all over the walls in Hamilton’s style. It said, “get out” and “just breathe” over and over again in red and black letters. I turned to see more of the house and when I turned more of the graffiti filled the walls. I felt like Hamilton was in the room, just out of range of my vision. I turned faster but couldn’t catch him, only traces of his outline. For some reason, I wanted to see him right then. More than Sam or Freedom Boy. I barely thought about those two. I spun around until the entire house was dripping with thick black paint, which slid of the walls and started flooding the room. It came up to my feet, then knees, until I had to trudge through the paint to get out of the house.

The town was empty. It was my Doolittle Falls, but also foreign. All the angles of the streets were off. Things that had been torn down years ago looked new, things from other towns were lined up where they shouldn’t have been. The nuclear reactor from Innsmouth sat in the distance, right where the Harpastball field once was. One of the reactors was pristine, billowing white smoke. The other was charred and crumbling, thick purple smoke pouring out of it. I remembered the voice in my head’s words and walked toward it.

Hamilton’s graffiti was sprayed on: You’ll c-r-a-p yourself! I heard Alice’s voice. “It’s been a long time.” I looked over. She was standing next to me, a genuine surprise. Her face was gaunt, pale bluish, her eyes were black and sunk into her skull. She wore her Halloween outfit but it had become ratty, the tunic threadbare. The animals glued to her seemed to be moving. I screwed up my face to take a closer look. They were no longer made of foam and paper mache, but were alive. There eyes were red and they were trying to escape from her but couldn’t. They were glued to her costume by their feet and they struggled faintly to get loose. Alice didn’t notice them.

I wanted to point this out, to ask her to save them, but instead said in a calm voice, “Long time since what?”

“Anyone’s walked these streets.”

“Where are we?”

“Doolittle Falls, of course,” she said. One of the squirrels began to gnaw at its own leg.

“But it seems so strange,” I said.

“Nothing strange about it,” George said. He walked on my left, in quick neat steps. He was half invisible, and half there. Invisibility floated over his body like a cloud, disappearing sections of him and making them translucent. “Just time and neglect. People don’t care for Heroes much these days. The ones left at least.”

“But why is this happening. What did this? What can I do?”

“Oh, Sarah, you did this. Don’t you remember?” George said.

“No. No, what did I do. Can I fix it?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Alice said. “You’ve been dead for years.”

 

I SPRINTED toward the reactors. I knew that they held the key somehow. But as I ran I heard footsteps behind me. Dr. Mann and Alice were chasing me. And behind them the crowd grew. Butters, Hocho, Wendy, George, Ms. Frankl, Johnny, my Dad, my Mom. I ran faster and faster but the crowd just got larger. Soon it seemed the whole town was there. I got to the gate at the Harpastball field and it was locked. I forced an enormous gust of wind that knocked down the mob and blasted the gate open. Sitting in the middle of the field were the reactors, one intact and one destroyed. A siren went off. Red lights started blaring from poles, drenching the town in red light.

The mob clutched their ears and writhed on the ground. Dark clouds filled the sky and lightning started to flash, then strike the reactor. I tried to stop it but I couldn’t. More and more strikes hit the reactor. It started pouring out black smoke. Everything I did just made it worse. I grew more and more panicked. I used all my energy to dispel the storm, but instead, and enormous lightning ball, the size of a house, shot out of the sky and hit the reactor. The walls cracked at the strike and the crack quickly spread like spider webs throughout the reactor. It seemed to pucker in, and then, an enormous blast of heat and fire shot out in all directions.

I screamed and tore at my skin. The fire raced across it. I watched as it bubbled up, blackened, and tore open, revealing muscle and fat beneath. My body was incinerating before my eyes. Then fell to the floor writhing in pain. It was agonizing. Suddenly, another blinding light came and my skin felt fine. I was sitting at the table in the room, across from Phobetor, the guard was behind the camera, and Phobetor was smiling. “Thank you,” Phobetor said. “That was terrific. Great show. Really good brain there.”Phobetor turned to the guard, who stopped the camera and gave him the tape like he was a robot. When he handed over the tape he slouched and looked perturbed. “Don’t do that,” the guard said.

“Or what?” Phobetor said. “Okay, that will be all.”

The guard came over and took me by the shoulders. Before we left, Phobetor held up the tape. “Your mother will enjoy this,” he said. “Getting to see her own daughter on film.”