[Fiction] Flea: Eruption Blues

[Flea]

"Why do they always pop on Friday nights?" complained Cassandra Weiss, as she opened the passenger door on the Project's Ford HC Econoline van. "Three eruptions in our region this year, and all three on a Friday night. Don't these people understand that I have a life and things to do on my weekends?" After belting in, the Rocky Mountain Regional Director for Project Utopia pulled the door closed and slid her leather satchel underneath the plush captain's chair. The sound of the closing door echoed from the concrete walls of the empty parking garage beneath the Rashoud facility in downtown Denver, Colorado.

"I'm just glad he's non-critical," replied Doctor Aaron Miller as he slid into one of the rear passenger seats. He tapped a clipboard on his thigh. "Boulder PD say that he's at home right now with a typical case of post-eruption shakes. I'm good with that. Better a little sleep than none at all." Doctor Miller had a point. Since there was no rush, they'd been able to wait until Saturday morning to make their intervention instead of racing up the freeway to Boulder at two o'clock in the morning.

Luther "Overdrive" Jenkins, the only nova on the regional intervention team, took his place behind the driver's wheel. Eschewing Eufiber, he wore a Project Utopia golf shirt and black denim jeans. While he had the unmistakable physiology of a nova, his stature was that of an endurance runner, not a muscle-bound titan.

"Makes no difference anyhow," he said in a Western Kentucky drawl, "There's no such thing as 'me time' as far as the Project is concerned."

Cassandra glanced over the tops of her eyeglasses at Luther, sending him yet another warning look. Ever since his assignment to Denver, he'd been complaining. If he wasn't the only nova on the Project's payroll in their Denver office, she'd have sent him packing already.

At the rear of the conversion van, Mike Lawson slid the last medical case into the small cargo area and slammed the double doors closed. He jumped in the side passenger door and slid it shut with a bang. A recent graduate of the University of Colorado, he'd not yet lost his sense of wonder at working for Project Utopia. The others in the office regarded him with a mixture of jaded amusement and mocking affection. It had taken him three months to shake off the title of "fucking new guy."

"Can we stop and get some doughnuts and coffee on the way?" he asked.

----------

An hour away in Boulder, Timothy Taylor lay on the bathroom floor in his suburban home, and the faded carpet felt as comfortable as a waterbed to him. His brown hair was filled with chalky white plaster dust and bits of debris. Wearing only an old T-shirt and boxer shorts, he felt the outside of the porcelain toilet bowl with an outstretched hand. More plaster dust could be seen under his fingernails.

"Oh toilet bowl," he whispered, "thank you for being so cool."

An empty ibuprofen bottle lay in the bottom of the wastebasket. In an effort to calm his jackhammer headache, he'd swallowed four of the pills at once, then four more, then another seven, exhausting the supply. They may as well have been jelly beans for all the good they'd done him.

A sudden rush of saliva warned Tim of what was about to happen again. Urgently, he clambered to a kneeling position in front of the stool and closed his eyes. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead, and he whispered a prayer.

"How many more?" he groaned.

At least one more, came the answer from his abdomen. He doubled over and vomited another mouthful of bitter bile into the bowl. Once he was sure this bout of heaving was through, he flipped the flush handle. With a sigh, he lay back into the corner, wedged against the bathtub.

"Can't be much left in there," he murmured to his rebel stomach, "you can stop doing that any time now."

I will just as soon as that damned node stops throbbing, he imagined his stomach replying. In his imagination, his stomach had the voice and demeanor of an angry union trucker.

"That node," he mumbled, leaning his head gently against the bathtub's sliding glass door. "That node. My node." He rolled the words around in his mind, getting used to the idea. "I have a node," he mumbled. "My node is in my head."

The teamster inside his stomach kicked him with a workboot, and Tim sat up quickly once more, peering into the toilet bowl.

"Yaaaaaaaaargh," he howled, heaving a tiny bit of bile into the toilet. It seemed to Tim as if the less that came out, the more it hurt. He squeezed his eyes shut and flipped the flush handle blindly.

Hooray for eruption, he thought sourly.

(to be continued.)

[Flea]

Boulder Police Sergeant Sheila Lussa drove through the residential neighborhood in which Tim Taylor lived. At 9:00 in the morning, she already had the air conditioning on. Although it had been relatively cool overnight, the morning sun made quick work of heating the air. She stopped her squad car alongside the patrol car already parked at the curb in front of Timothy Taylor's home, so that the two cars were facing in opposite directions, a formation jokingly referred to as "Adam 69." Sheila rolled down her window, and in the adjacent car Patrolman Glen Sutton did the same.

"Morning, Glen," Sheila said, speaking first, "anything unusual happen overnight?"

"Nu-uh," Glen replied laconically, "since we dropped him off last night, he's been going back and forth from the bedroom to the bathroom and that's about it; no weird lights or noises or anything like that."

"Okay," Sheila said, nodding, "I appreciate you sitting out here all night. Why don't you go ahead and punch out? We'll have a busy day tomorrow, so take the rest of today off. I'll need you rested and ready for the fourth."

"You got it, Sarge," Glen replied, brightening visibly, clearly delighted to have nearly a full day off, "see ya then." After Glen drove away, Sheila parked her own car where his had been. With the motor and the air conditioner still running, she sat and waited for the Project's intervention team to arrive.

She didn't have long to wait, as Project Utopia's navy blue Ford van arrived fifteen minutes later, and parked in Timothy's driveway. Three doors opened as one, and the four passengers spilled out. Overdrive closed his door and leaned lazily against the front fender with his arms crossed. Mike Lawson had run around to the back door and had jerked them open, quickly retrieving two small cases and opening them on the pavement.

Sergeant Lussa got out of her car to join the Utopian crew, and was met halfway by Cassandra. Cassandra shifted her attache to her left hand and extended her right.

"Cassandra Weiss," she said smoothly, "Regional Director for Project Utopia."

"Sergeant Sheila Lussa," Sheila replied. "What is it you people plan to do here today?"

"Once we make sure that he's not emitting anything dangerous, we'll go in and talk to him," Cassandra said. Behind her, Mike was excitedly waving a hand-held meter in the air and squinting at the display. "Usually we try to get them to come down to the Rashoud Center in Denver for an exam and a good talking-to. It's a big change, erupting into a nova, and we like to make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible."

"I'd like to stick around, see what it is you do," Sheila replied. "This is a first for Boulder." And I can keep an eye on you, too, she thought. She hoped that her sunglasses would conceal her thoughts.

"No problem," Cassandra replied, "it's all very straightforward." Nosy peon, she thought. Cassandra turned back to the van, where Doctor Miller and Mike were gathering up the assorted measuring devices.

"All good here," the doctor told Cassandra, "no X-rays, microwaves, dangerous RF emissions, radiation, or anything else like that. He folded the velcro flap shut on a bulky black meter case and tossed the cordura bundle back into the van. He turned to Mike, the new guy. "Grab my medical kit, will you?"

Cassandra glanced at Overdrive, who was still leaning lazily against the van.

Big oaf isn't even sweating in this heat, she thought, grumpily. "Overdrive, we need your special talents if you don't mind," she said, mostly masking her disdain for the native Kentuckian. "Can you pop off a ping and make sure he's inside?"

"Piece o' cake," Overdrive drawled without moving. "Okay, done. There's one nova inside, sure enough." The subtle discharge of quantum energy was imperceptible to baselines, but a nova would notice it as plainly as a gong.

Inside his home, things had begun to improve ever so slightly for Timothy Taylor. He'd not thrown up in three hours, and he was able to relax in his bed, atop the sheets. His head still throbbed like a Megadeth concert, but at least it was a steady pain.

Overdrive's ping changed that. To the freshly-exposed nerve endings inside his brain, the quantum ping felt as if someone had peeled the top off of his skull, scooped out his brains onto the floor, and then smashed them flat with an immense wooden mallet. It hurt too much to scream, and all Tim could do was gasp in agony, every muscle in his body tensed. When his breath did return, it came to him in the form of coughing. He coughed and wheezed, and tried to blink the black and purple spots out of his vision.

"What the fuck?" he gasped, as the most immediate pain began to abate. His pulse throbbed in his ears like the roars of waterfalls, and he wasn't sure that his eyeballs would stay in their sockets. Slowly, he relaxed his muscles, but remained curled up in a ball on his bed.

Outside, the four Utopians and one Boulder police sergeant had approached his front door.

(to be continued.)

[Flea]

Doctor Miller, Cassandra Weiss, and Sergeant Shiela Lussa stood together before the front door of Tim Taylor's home. Mike Lawson, the new guy, stood behind them, carrying the bulky medical kit. Overdrive leaned idly against the vinyl siding adjacent to the door and tried to look uninterested.

Cassandra shifted her leather satchel to her left hand and pressed the doorbell button. From the front porch, it was impossible to tell if the bell had chimed or not.

"I didn't hear anything," Cassandra said, "maybe it doesn't work." She stabbed the button a few more times, more firmly.

"I don't hear it either," agreed Doctor Miller.

Inside, Tim Taylor had rolled off of his bed and onto the carpeted floor of his bedroom.

"Stop ringing the God-damned doorbell," he hissed as he unsteadily clambered back to a seated position on the bed's edge. Still in a daze, he looked around his bedroom and spotted his dirty laundry pile. The jeans and shirt atop the pile were filthy with plaster dust and rubble, but he knew that semi-clean clothing lurked beneath. Tim pushed his hand into the pile and grabbed something that felt like denim. Withdrawing it, he was pleased to see that he'd scored a pair of not-so-dirty blue jeans.

"I rule," he cheered weakly after checking the jeans for unpleasant smells and finding none. The doorbell had stopped ringing, he noticed.

"Good. I'm not home. Go away," Tim mumbled. His stomach gurgled, and he realized that he was very hungry. Still sitting on the bed, he carefully considered his stomach, and decided after a moment that it felt like food ought to stay down, so long as he kept breakfast simple. "Captain Crunch, Captain Crunch," he sang to himself, pulling on the jeans, "He's the one we love to munch. Captain Crunch, Captain Crunch, munch a bunch a munch a munch." Through the skewed blinds, he could see that it was the beginning of another clear and sunny Summer day in Boulder.

"A little food, a little water, a little sun, and I'll be good as new," he reasoned. "Wonder what's on TV."

Tim had made it halfway down the hallway toward the kitchen when the knocking began. Most people knock a few times in cadence and stop. Knock knock knock knock, pause, knock knock knock knock, and so on. Whoever was at his door was far more insistent. Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock, it went, an unending series of sharp raps that neither intensified or tapered off.

"Fuck," he gasped. "Fine." Instead of continuing to the kitchen, Tim turned short to go through the living room to the front door.

Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock, continued the knocking.

Outside, Overdrive continued rapping on the door. As he knocked, he looked at his boss, Cassandra.

"How long do I have to keep this up?" he asked.

"Keep knocking," she replied impatiently.

Luther rolled his eyes and persisted in the robotic knocking motion.

"Maybe he's in trouble," Mike suggested. "Maybe we should just go in."

Everyone looked at Sheila Lussa, the police sergeant.

"You guys are the experts," she said neutrally, "So if you think he's in danger, there's cause for us to enter. Do you think he is in danger?"

Inside, Tim reached for the doorknob. The knocking had stopped, but he was sure that whoever had been knocking was still there. Before he could grasp it, the knob began rattling. Someone was trying to open the locked door from the outside.

"Hang on," he said testily, annoyed that a stranger was trying to open the door to his home. He flipped the lock, and the door sprang open. He stepped back to avoid being hit by the swinging door. Outside, Sheila, Mike, Cassandra, Overdrive, and Doctor Miller had also stepped back.

They stared across the threshold at each other.

Tim spoke first, squinting against the harsh daylight. "Yes?" he asked.