Power Network: Experiment (Chapter 2)

Here we are, first part of the second chapter of my Power Network story, I know it's quite late, but at least I managed to finish it. As usual feedback will be highly appreciated.

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Experiment

Written by Anon

Revised by Argonaut

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Lyn stared at the writing and the writing stared back at her. She had the crazy feeling that the two O’s of “hope” and “enjoyed” were eyeballing her. She was sitting in the small kitchen of her apartment. The note lay on the table amid the remains of her breakfast. She had consumed four bowls of corn flakes, an entire bottle of orange juice, and twelve slices of toast. She hadn’t exactly felt hungry, but somehow she knew that her body needed food, and lots of it.

Lyn sighed. She had tried to put the note out of her mind, but she knew that sooner or later she would have to deal with it, and with all the other strange things that had happened since yesterday. She had already examined the door of her apartment with her enhanced vision, and although she was hardly an expert, it didn’t look as if anyone had picked the lock. The windows were closed, except for the transom-window in the bathroom, but that was too small even for Calypso, the janitor’s old cat, to crawl through. The situation was starting to freak her out. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Lyn had a logical mind. People who didn’t know her well tended to assume that she lacked imagination, but this was not true. Lyn was able to look at things with an open mind, weighing even the most outlandish ideas in the light of reason. But could she possibly make sense of all the strange events of the past twelve hours?

“The hell with this,” she grumbled, pushing herself up from the table. Unfortunately, she misjudged her strength and the table turned over, sending the remains of her breakfast flying around the kitchen. For a moment, Lyn panicked and, suddenly, from her point of view everything was frozen, motionless. The breadcrumbs danced a slow-motion ballet in midair, the spilled orange juice hung suspended in a bubble like the pictures Lyn had seen of liquids in zero gravity, the cereal bowl spun slowly, flinging milk droplets in a lazy spiral, the spoon and the milk bottles floated off in opposite direction. Still unaccustomed to her new powers of perception, Lyn stared entranced at the scene for a moment; then her common sense returned and she reached out to catch the flying objects before they crashed. She snatched the bowl, the spoon, the glass in the blink of an eye and put them in the sink. Looking at the floating bubble of orange juice, she decided to try an experiment. Cautiously, she stuck out her tongue and licked the bubble like an ice-cream cone. The result was quite different from what she expected: The bubble burst, splashing juice all over her face. Startled, Lyn went out of her super-speed state, and everything else felt to the floor in a cacophony of crashes and splashes. She took a cloth from the sink and wiped her face, wondering why that happened.

Then she understood. She was the one who had been moving at an impossibly high speed, not the rest of the world that had frozen; so when she licked the juice bubble, the tip of her tongue had probably imparted an enormous amount of kinetic energy, shattering the surface tension that held the bubble together. “I’d better clean up his mess.” she thought, reaching the mop. “First the window, now this. These powers are fun, but if I didn’t get them under control soon, I’ll probably tear the house apart.”

After cleaning the floor, she decided to make some notes. She always found that writing things down helped her to put them in the right perspective. She took out a notepad and a couple of pencils and wrote in the middle of the top sheet: “How did I get these powers?”

She circled the word “powers” three times, then drew arrows pointing to “super-strength”, “super-speed”, “enhanced senses” and “invulnerability”. After “invulnerability”, she placed a row of question marks. While there was no sign of any injury on her body, the memory of her recent wounds was too vivid to be set aside. So she wasn’t altogether sure about her invulnerability. Then she added a bigger arrow, writing “Mark and Jack tried to kill me” all in capital letters. Frowning she crossed off two words. “Mark and Jack killed me!!!”

As she wrote the last exclamation point, her brain and hands suddenly went into overdrive. Questions flashed through her mind at lightnining speed, clamoring for her attention. The paper almost caught fire form the friction generated by the furious motion of the pencil across its surface.

“Why am I still alive?”

“Why didn’t Mark’s second bullet wound me?”

“How could I have survived without even a scratch?”

“What about this new body?”

“What will I tell Chrissie?”

“Who was that woman?”

After writing this last question, she paused, tapping the pencil on the notepad. It was clear to her that the mysterious woman was the key to everything. She was the last person Lyn had seen before blacking out, so she was probably responsible for what had happened to her – or at least she knew something about it. Lyn re-read her notes carefully, then slowly added a new question to the list: “Who is N.A.?”

She thought back, for the hundredth time, on the events of the previous evening. While her mind wandered, her hand moved across the paper. Snapping out of her reverie, she looked at the paper and her mouth dropped open. There on the page before her was a perfect portrait of the mysterious woman she had enountered in the garage, so life-like that Lyn almost expected the woman to speak. “How is this possible?” Lyn marveled. She had never had any skill at drawing.

She looked at her hands and closed the fingers, clenching them into a fist, then opening them one a time. She moved them in patterns, pinky to thumb, then back, then trying more and more elaborate permutations, faster and faster, her fingers dancing like those of a concert pianist, all without effort or strain. “Of course,” she thought. “I possess heighted muscle control. Otherwise – well, my strength would have reduced this apartment to a pile of rubble by now.” She glanced up at a couple of orange juice stains on the ceiling. “Still, I need to be careful. I think I’ll go for a run.”

The city’s old industrial area ran for a couple miles along both sides of the river. Once thriving, it was now practically empty. Some of the factories had gone defunct during the Great Depression, big empty buildings waiting to be demolished; others had been abandoned more recently, back in the early ’90s, when so many industries had been outsourced to other countries, like Romania or Taiwan. A few of the buildings were still used as warehouses; otherwise, the area had been left to drifters and criminals.

It took Lyn longer than she expected to reach it, not because she was slow – in fact she had run all the way from the campus in less than a minute – but because she had had trouble finding something to wear. All her clothes were made for the shorter, less athletic, less well-endowed woman that she used to be. Even Chrissie’s clothes were too small for Lyn now. Eventually Lyn put on the old pair of sweatpants and oversized t-shirt that she sometimes wore on movie night or as a pajamas. Now she was standing in front of the main entrance of Lexon Steelworks, an old factory which had closed back in the ’80s. Taking care not to be seen, she made her way to the high fence behind the building and jumped over it. The heavy padlock and the thick chain that secured the back door didn’t pose any more of an obstacle, as her finger sliced through the metal with ease.

Apart form a layer of dust almost an inch thick and the rust-colored stains on the walls, there was little to see inside the cavernous room. Lyn started examining the doors until she found what she was looking for: the storage area. She was curious about the extent of her newly-gained powers. Calculating her speed was simple enough – all she had to do was see how long it took her to run a given distance, and do some simple arithmetic. But measuring her strength was different matter, and that was why she had come to this old factory. First she was going to test herself against various objects of known mass and tensile strength, then she was going to analyze the results with the help of some of her scientifically-inclined friends. She wondered how they would react when she showed them her data They'd think she was joking, or crazy. “Maybe,” she pondered looking for a way to take them into her confidence, “It’ll be easier if I give them a little demonstration…” She discarded the idea almost immediately, a demonstrantion meant explanations, something she was still looking for. “Oh, well, I’ll worry about that later,” she thought. “Let's focus on this for the moment.” She wandered for a while among the stacks of I-beams, metal sheets and rolls of rebar, noting their weights and yield strength.

Lyn paused by a stack of small I-beams and took a notepad and MP3 player from her backpack. She copied the inscription engraved on the side of one of the beams and started recording “Okay, this is Linette, with super-strength test number one. I’m going to see how long takes me to bend an I-beam in half.” She looked at her notes. “The beam is classified as W20x22 and A36 … whatever that means.”

She stopped the recorder and took the beam in her hands. It was about eighteen inches long and she guessed that it weighed about forty pounds, but to her it felt almost weightless. Grasping it at both ends, she inhaled deeply and started pushing her hands together. The metal screamed in protest, yielding to the irresistible pressure Lyn was exerting. In less than a second, the beam was bent double. Lyn kept pushing and in another few seconds the beam snapped in half. Lyn dropped the two halves with a shrug and turned on the recorder. “Test one. It took me about, um, about three seconds to snap the beam in half. I’m going to try bending a beam the other way, with the, uh … flanges, I think… horizontal.” She paused, looking down at the remains of her first experiment. “But, somehow, I don’t expect the result to be much different.”

Half an hour later, Lyn stood dejectedly amid dozens of mangled I-beams, ripped metal sheets, fragments of rebar – all testimonials to her new irrestible strength. She examined her last experiment – a meter-long I-beam twisted like a corkscrew. Idly, she stood balancing it, first on the palm of one hand, then on the ends of her fingers. It made no difference – while she was somehow capable of asserting the weight of the object with high precision – it still seemed negigible against her strength, even balanced on the tip of her pinky.

“Aarrrghh! This is pointless!” she cried in frustration, throwing the beam against the opposite wall. The room shook as the beam tore through the sheetrock. Then she froze. Something was wrong. Beneath the crash, her enhanced hearing was picking up the sound of voices outside the building.

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Moving stealthily through the abandoned factory, Lyn made her way back to the main entrance. She could hear the voices clearly through the thick wall, but she wanted to see who they belonged to.

“Are you sure it’s high-grade stuff?”

“Come on, man! How often have we done business? Have I ever tried to scam you?”

Lyn slid carefully along the factory wall until she stood directly under a window set just beneath the high ceiling. She estimated the distance and then she sprang straight up. She grabbed the sill and pulled herself effortlessly up until she could peer through the grimy, broken glass. Two cars were parked in the front courtyard, a green Pontiac coupe and a black Wrangler JK. They looked quite ordinary, not like the gaudily pimped-up rides that criminals drive on TV. These cars belonged to people who knew the value of discretion and didn’t need chrome rims, giant flaps or a 300-watt stereo to assert their position in the criminal world. Six men were scatered around the courtyard. Four of them looked like hired muscle, bodyguards waiting for their bosses to finish their business. The other two were clearly the bosses. One was a dark-complexioned man in his early thirties, a South American Lyn guessed from his accent, with dark hair and a strong build. The other was a Caucasian in his late forties, tall and thin, with a receding hairline and a stylish brown suit that looked out of place in these gritty surroundings.

The older one was talking. “Yes, we’ve done a lot of business, but – ” He took out a pack of chewing-gums and offered a stick to the other. “You know how you stay alive in this business. You follow the rules.”

The South American unwrapped the gum and put it in his mouth. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, chewing vigorously. “Protocol must be observed.” Protocol was the code they lived by, the rules governing the complex world of crime. No one advanced beyond a certain level without knowing it, and none went beyond that level without abiding by it. “So are you saying the deal’s off?”

“Did I say that?” The older man smiled and Lyn saw the gleam of a golden canine in the sunlight. He seemed familiar, somehow. Her eyes focused on the man, her vision zoomed in, examining every wrinkle, every hair, every skin pore. Neural impulses began tapping urgently in the memory region of her cortex, summoning up a photograph image of someone she had seen years before. Yes -- she had seen this same man, younger and not so well-dressed, behind the gymnasium of her high school, holding a clear plastic bag contatining some pills ... steroids ... he was selling steroids ... he was selling steroids to Jake! Rage boiled inside her. Jake had been her friend, one of her best friends, before the drugs had changed him. She felt a pang of remorse, recalling how she had beaten Jake the night before, but then her thoughts were all focused on the old man. She wanted to beat him, to take him by the throat and smash that arrogant, devious smile from his face.

Furious, Lyn dug her fingers into the windowsill. A chunk of it broke off in her hand and before she realized what was happening, she was falling to the floor thirty feet below. She landed clumsily, striking her head against an old steel drum that was lying near the wall. Unhurt but confused, she picked herself up, brushing the thick dust from her clothes as the steel drum rang like a bell, sending loud echoes through the cavernous room. Lyn’s super-hearing picked up another sound: the quick footsteps of the men outside, running toward the door. Lyn turned and ran to the far end of the room, looking for a place to hide. She had no fear of the men, but she didn’t want to show her face – not now, not yet.

Agree wholeheartedly with Y. Excellent stuff Anon! Look forward to more!


Elf

Great stuff, Anon. Keep it going, at whatever pace you can.

Thanks guys, and here's the next part

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Jim Rostov moved swiftly but cautiously inside the abandoned factory. He was twenty-nine years old – no mean achievement in a profession with such a low life expectancy. The grandson of Russian immigrants, Jim had been a Marine, then an enforcer for the mob before he started working as a freelancer a couple of years ago. Right now he was looking at long clean furrow in the dust that covered the floor. He couldn’t figure out what had caused it. Not willing to take any chances, he called for his partner.

“Mike, over here!”

Mike was not as muscular as Jim, or as highly trained. But he was a capable opearative and a reliable partner. Mr. Chambers chose his bodyguards with care. “What’s up, Rost?”

Jim didn’t like that nickname, but this was no time to argue. “Take a look.” He pointed the wide trail running along the dusty floor. “What do you think caused that?”

Mike knelt and examined it. “Don’t know. Wasn’t a person, but I didn’t hear a motor.”

“Yeah. Well, whatever it is, I’m going in. You cover me.” Jim began following the trail. It was so wide and deep that only a blind man could possibly miss it.

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Hidden among the roof beams, Lyn was silently cursing herself. Alarmed and dazed by the clanging of the steel drum, she hadn’t noticed that her super-speed had left a wide trail in the dust-covered floor. Now she was looking down, watching the movements of the four big men below. Two of them moved with practiced efficiency, taking care to cover each other. She decided to deal with them later. The other two looked easier to handle. Gauging the distance between the beams, Lyn began jumping from one to the next, landing with pinpoint accuracy and perfect coordination. She kept perfectly quiet, despite the excitement she was feeling. This whole siutation felt unreal yet engrossing, like a videogame. In a moment she was standing forty feet over one of the men. She scanned him quickly with her super-senses. He was tall and broad-shouldered, he was waving a nasty-looking gun, and he seemed to be very nervous. She could smell the tang of fear in his perspiration, she could see the barely-perceptible twitch of his finger on the trigger of his gun. Biting her lip to suppress a giggle of nervous excitement, Lyn decided to play a little game with her targets. Carefully, she took a quarter from the pocket of her sweatpants, then scanned the scene below, trying to decide on a suitable target. The crushed steel drum at the opposite side of the room caught her attention. "Perfect," she thought. She balanced the quarter on her thumbnail and took careful aim. A casual flick of her thumb sent the coin flying across the room like a bullet. It struck the drum with a plangent clang that echoed from the walls.

The men spun round, peering through the dim room to see where the noise was coming from. Before they could recover from their confusion, Lyn sprang from her perch high overhead, landing with cat-like grace a few yards from her chosen target. Swiftly, she placed a hand over his mouth and wrapped an arm around his chest in a steely grip. She sprang upward, reaching out and pulling herself up onto a roof beam with her captive still clutched to her chest. The man had passed out, letting go of the pistol he was holding. Lyn’s hand flashed out and caught it. Crouching on the beam, she propped the man against a strut and swiftly removed his shoes and his belt. She used the belt to lash him to the strut, then she pulled off one of his socks and stuffed it into his mouth. The whole thing had taken only a few seconds.

She stood fearlessly on the beam, looking down at her captive. Involuntarily a corner of her mouth twitched in a sardonic grin. How frightened she would have been of him, only yesterday. And how harmless, pathetic even, he seemed to her now.

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Jim and Mike had been the first to locate the source of the noise. The steel drum was still vibrating and they could see a large dent in the rusty metal. As they approached for a closer look, Jack joined them. Jack was good with a gun, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“Hey, where’s your partner?” Mike asked.

Jack stopped in his tracks and turned with a puzzled look on his face. Tony had been right behind him, but now he was gone. A line of footprints in the dust ended abruptly, as if Tony had simply vanished. Jack furrowed his brow, making an effort to think. “He was … behind me,” he stammered. “Just a moment ago …”

Silently, cautiously, the three men formed a close circle, back to back, looking about frantically for some sign of the missing man – for any sign of danger, any unusual movement, any faint sound, that could tell them what had happened to him.

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High up in the shadows, Lyn was crouching on a beam directly above the three men. She didn’t need to see their faces. Their tension, their fear and their uncertanty were almost palpable. Since her strategy had worked so well once, she decided to try it again. She removed the ammunition clip from Tony’s pistol and took out a bullet. She put it in her mouth, holding between her teeth, taking care not to bite it in half. The super-tough enamel coating her teeth was probably strong enough to slice through a diamond. She was sure that she could bite through the brass casing of a bullet as if it were cheese. She grinned, exposing her upper incisors, preparing for her next move…

Last installment for a while, I'm still writing the next paragraphs

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Mike swallowed nervously. His mouth was dry and he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He glanced at his partner. Jim was moving his head slowly from left to right, scanning the shadowy room. The hand that held his gun was steady. Mike hated and envied Jim’s ability to stay cool under pressure.

A small object fell softly in the dust, just a few inches from his foot. Mike jumped. Stooping, he picked it up with trembling fingers. It was a bullet – a .45 ACP. There was something odd about the casing. He held it up for a closer look…

Clearly inscribed in the metal casing were the marks of human teeth.

“What the hell!” Mike dropped the bullet and jumped back. The other two men turned to stare at him. Mike was looking around with wide, frightened eyes. Who was playing these tricks? Where was he hiding?

There was a stack of crates, about six feet high, toward the wall on the left. Blinded by rage and terror Mike charged toward it.

“Mike, wait!”

But Mike had already circled behind the crates. Cursing under his breath, Jim began running after him, with Jack following close behind.

Mike’s scream echoed from the walls, then stopped abruptly, as if a radio had suddenly been turned off. Jim rounded the stack of crates…

Mike had disappeared.

Jim knelt to inspect the trail of footprints that Mike had left behind him. They simply stopped, behind the crates, as if Mike, too, had suddenly vanished from the face of the earth.

Jack was looking over Jim’s shoulder. “What the fuck?”

Jim rose shakily to his feet. He could feel the tight clutch of panic gripping his chest. “I – ” His voice was an unsteady squeak suddenly swallowed by the echo of a prolonged metallic creak, like the cackling of a witch.

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Lyn crouched on a roof beam as she surveyed the scene below. Her second captive, still unconscious, lay secured to the beam with a steel strut that she had torn off and wrapped around his body.

“Okay, now what?” she thought as she slipped the man’s pistol into the waistband of her sweatpants. Down below, the other two men were standing back to back, waving their guns around and looking frantically in all directions. “They won’t fall for these tricks again. I’ll have to try something else.” She glanced at the pistol in her hand and a smile spread across her face. She had an idea.

Holding a pistol in each hand, she leapt from beam to beam until she reached a good position. She raised her arms, gauging the angle and distance, and with a flick of each wrist she sent the pistols spinning toward the two men below. Jim looked up just as a pistol grazed the side of his head. The other pistol struck Jack a split-second later. The two men dropped to the floor as the guns went skittering toward the wall, trailing tiny clouds of dust in their wake. Lyn nodded with satisfaction. Not only had her aim been perfect, but she thrown the missiles with just the right amount of force – thanks to her uncanny level of muscle control – enough to knock the men out cold without splitting their heads open like a pair of rotten pumpkins.

“Bulls-eye,” Lyn smiled. “And now for the grand finale...”

love your story!Really great job so far

Thanks I juts hope to be able to circumvent my usual writer block and complete another chapter in a reasonable time.