[Fiction] How Deep do you Believe

[Madison 'Vali' West]

Warning: Mature Content and Violence

Force, properly applied, solves any problem. Force inappropriately applied, makes things worse.

Rage.

I let the rage move me … or was it fury … I never could separate those two.

I drove the man’s face into the wall. Bricks, teeth, and bone shattered and mixed with the mucus of his now-bloody nasal cavities. It was exhilarating. I felt his buddy coming up with a knife behind me and flowed sideways, keeping my back to him so that his blow missed. He was over-extended, so I kept spinning and slammed my elbow into the back of his head, adding his blood to the developing tapestry on the wall. Only humans, though they had expectations that their numbers would matter.

I kept moving. Three were messing with something in a car trunk to my right and another guy across from me was bringing up his Mac. It was time to dance. I spun a half-step, as if I was going to cut back to some cover so that Mr. Mac knew he had my attention. It let his mind focus down to the point of the gun … and me. I cut back to my right and began running. I glanced down into the trunk as I raced past; two shotguns and an Uzi with a suppressor. Nice. I slammed the middle guy’s forehead into the top of the trunk’s door and I raced past. Mr. Mac opened fire right about when I figured he would and people died. I had better things to do. God, but I felt so alive. Beating people to death is personally satisfying, but outthinking them into killing each other had its own rewards. It was a field experiment applying personal psychology and a bit of physics, as well as firearms lore.

I began thinking too much, getting to full of myself and caught a bat because of it. Fortunately, I’m rock-hard, in a super-human sort of way. I rolled with the hit and under it. It looked like I had been clothes-lined, I’m sure.

The guy’s quick. He comes back with the bat for a head shot. I catch it inches from my face and give it a quick yank. His head snaps down and I smack the bat up into it. He flies back, death-grip on the bat, and I ride the momentum back up. Mr. Mac is adjusting, I see, but the rest of the crew is still hesitating due to the friendly fire. More fire is coming my way and I need to dodge. Sure enough, Bat-man’s chest scored crimson to match his ruined face and he keeps flipping back toward to the floor. I’m keeping count and nineteen to one is now down to thirteen. I wondered if they were still seeing the numbers as all that good.

The Mac’s empty right on schedule, poor dumb bastard. I caught the bat as it leaves its form owner’s hands and harpoon Mr. Mac as he fumbled for the next clip. A pistol goes off, but it’s a snapshot and goes wide. I found myself smiling behind my mask. I followed the throw with a leap into the ceiling. I’m above the lights now, were I began, and they are staring up into the darkness pass their own damning illumination. The pistol goes off once, twice and someone shouted him down. I caught sight of the Shouter as he tried to handle the situation … me. I found the chains they use to hoist up engine blocs. I snagged a link between my toes and jerk upwards. The noise gets them, but they hear the hoist, not my location. A fundamental understanding of acoustics escapes them. I whipped the chain down like a striking serpent and caught Mr. Shouter at the top of his skull and he dropped like the sack of shit he was. The pistol went off again, closer this time.

I dropped down from the ceiling near an aluminum roll-bar. I can taste the panic starting to take hold and it excites and annoys me. I don’t want them to get away, but I love playing them the way they have played their victims. Two of them attack and the rest run.

The first attacker has some Tae Kwon Do training and he thinks it will help him. I toss him the roll bar and give a snap kick to number two’s throat. Two tons of force propelled him into Mr. TKD. They make a meaty, bone-breaking mess smashing through the steel and wooden work tables. I caught the roll-bar and ran after the rest.

I find them. I kill them. I find no release in the killing even as my soul sings that I’m finally doing something. I want to go home. I want someone to tell me everything is going to be alright.

[Madison 'Vali' West]

{Two Months Earlier}

Greg is angry with the producers again. It’s the same old story. They see novas as some sort of commodities, or worse, as celebrities to be exploited. They don’t have a clue about them as people, both the underserved acclaim and the minds dealing with the sudden Godsend of power. No, they want to package them and sell them for mass consumption. Their latest idea is to turn one of the new recruits, this Madison “Vali” West into some sort of sex symbol for the female demographic, 15 to 45.

“Well,” he starts off, “do we have any idea as to his sexual orientation?”

To their credit, they hardly skip a beat.

“If he’s in the closet,” the female face purrs, “we know he’s safe. If he’s open about it, we can turn that into the whole ‘positive gay-youth’ angle. ‘Gay boy doing good’ and that kind of stuff.”

Greg holds down the vomit. That it doesn’t show on his face implies he’s been doing this too long.

“Do we have any idea on what he’s like? I mean, is he safe? Does he have any quirks or drawbacks that could come back and bite the Knights in the ass later?”

“Well,” the other face responds seriously, “he aced our psych profiles. He’s 100% rock solid human. No worries there.”

Greg shakes his head. “Dammit, have any of you actually talked to this kid. He could talk circles around our psych-staff, no sweat.”

The female face shushes in, “Greg, the whole ‘taint-thing’ is a non-issue. Alchemist’s report has given him a clean bill. His taint is,” she taps her stylus across the screen, “very manageable with no likelihood of taint related aberrations in the near or intermediate future. Greg, hon, we are on this. We’ve got a nice, clean-cut hometown boy here. The press is eating him up. We couldn’t have struck more gold if we had minted this one in Alchemist’s labs.”

Greg looked back and forth between the marketing people and the producers. He knew this was a fight he wasn’t going to win by the looks on their faces. Now he had to break the news to the Vali kid.

Vali had been surprisingly receptive to the idea, which gave Greg pause. His one condition was that the contest for the ‘first date’ was a literary contest, not some random crap-shoot. Poetry, short stories, song lyrics, or novellas, he didn’t care, but he wanted it to be something of momentary value. Greg wasn’t sure if he should be afraid by the boy’s serious demeanor, or encouraged by his thoughtfulness.

The winner was a Medical student from Loyola who worked at the Children’s Hospital. It had been postcard perfect, so Greg automatically assumed the train wreck was just around the corner.