The Subatomic Kid (2 page)

Tex gazed around the bus and saw a pretty girl sitting on her own studying a book. He smiled and reached out a beefy arm, clamped it around John’s shoulder, and squeezed as hard as he could. “I’ll bet you, Cal, that this fake can’t get a date with that babe.” He pointed her out to them.

“Well,” said Cal, “I think he can; after all, he’s a star now.”

They both laughed as Tex slipped his hand down to the middle of John’s back and pushed him off the seat. He stumbled to his feet, clutching the skateboard like a life raft. On the one hand he was glad to be away from Tex and Cal, but on the other he was petrified at the mere thought of having to talk to a girl.

With the blood pumping in his ears and each step taking a gigantic effort, he inched toward her; she was reading and remaining aloof from the banter in the back seat. John grasped a pole for support and leaned over. “Hey” he said. It was the first thing that came into his head.

She turned her head and glanced up at him. “Hey,” she replied. “Do you want to sit down?” She patted the seat with her hand.

John nearly collapsed; it was the girl he had a crush on, but he didn’t want her to know that. He gripped the pole extra hard as he eased himself into the seat and stared at her. Her short, brown hair was bouncy and flowed with the movement of her head. Deep blue eyes stared at him with a mixture of kindness and skepticism.

“I saw you on that thing earlier,” she pointed at the skateboard in his hands. “It was really dangerous and stupid; you know that, don’t you?”

John nodded his head, it took a tremendous effort to get over his embarrassment and speak, but he gave it a shot. “It wasn’t planned,” he said. “Things just got out of control.”

“You could have been injured or killed,” she said, “and that would be a tremendous waste of life just for showing off, wouldn’t it?”

“I wasn’t showing off,” John said softly. “I really was out of control. Swerving to avoid a pack of dogs forced me into the road going too fast to stop, and everything else you saw was just a blur to me.”

He gazed around the bus; nobody was paying attention to him anymore, but he could feel Cal and Tex watching him from behind. It felt like tiny daggers hitting the back of his neck. “I don’t even know your name,” John lied again.

“It’s Kate,” she replied offhandedly, without even looking up from her book.

As far as he could tell, this was the way girls were. First they made you feel great, and then they made you feel lousy at the same time. All his friends told him to stay away from them, but he found that he had this strange desire to be close to a girl, and this girl in particular.

Today is a strange day
, he thought—he’d already had an amazing adventure, and here he was sitting next to the girl of his dreams.

“What’s that book you’re reading?” he asked.

“It’s about Haiku,” she replied, not even looking up. “It’s a form of Japanese poetry.”

“I know Haiku,” he said. “
A sudden downpour! Thunderclouds are cracking! And round the farmhouse all the ducks run, quacking.”

“Why? To stop themselves from becoming crazed killing machines, they needed to stay in contact with the basic simplicity of life. One of the ways they did that was to practice Haiku in just the same way they practiced with their swords. I’ve got books on the subject at home.”

“You do?” she questioned with pleased surprise.

“Sure.”

“Well, maybe I could come over to your house and take a look at your books. We’re going to have a test on this soon, and I need to know everything I can find out.”

John was amazed at her response; he was pretty sure this qualified as a date. Tex wouldn’t be pleased because he’d bet against him twice now and lost both times, but Cal would be happy. Besides, just the thought of having Kate come over to his house while his mom was away made him delirious with joy.

“Absolutely,” John said. “How about Saturday morning?” He was so eager he wanted it to happen as soon as possible. He knew very little about playing hard to get.

“It’s a date,” said Kate. “Give me your address.”

As he scribbled his address on her book cover, John considered how strange the morning had been. It was, after all, what he wanted, but under the most ridiculous circumstances. What other changes awaited him down the road, he wondered? He couldn’t even have imagined.

SUBTERFUGE

TWO YEARS EARLIER

Doctor Kurt Angstrom loved darkness; he could float upon it, something he couldn’t do in the light. In the light he was uncomfortable because he was continually reminded of his physical limitations. People pitied him and he hated to be pitied, or they ignored him and he couldn’t stand to be ignored.

He had been blessed with a brilliant mind, but it was trapped in a useless body, a body that was wasting away with age. His lack of exposure to natural sunlight had a deleterious effect upon him; it turned his hair as gray as ashes, and made his skin almost translucent, like the soft underbelly of a snake.

Rather ironically though, he had amassed a fortune from making other people healthy. While searching high and low across the globe to find a cure for his own particular malady, he had discovered cures for countless others. His intuitive scientific skills mystically revealed healing properties deep within the cellular structure of plants—properties that had beneficial effects on the organs that govern muscles, nerves, and tissue. He had an innate understanding and knowledge of how to treat and maintain vigorous and virile human structures, but he had drawn a blank on reanimating his own.

Trapped as he was in a wheelchair, he tapped his fingernails on the armrests nervously, and listened to the clicking sound as it reverberated around the marble and glass facade of his Manhattan penthouse. He was a prisoner of circumstance, a billionaire perched atop a skyscraper that housed his corporate headquarters, GLOBAL ELIXIRS INC.

He so wanted to soar, he so wanted to swoop, he so wanted to exact retribution—and that retribution would be to live free of his impediment while punishing those he deemed responsible for its unspeakable indignity. He chuckled to himself; just like the Roman emperor Caligula, he relished the emotional rush of revenge.

With the aid of his hated half brother, Doctor Aaron Leitz, he now thought it possible to actually change the molecular structure of his own body. Every infinitesimal atom would be renewed and he would no longer be crippled. In fact, quite the reverse would be true; he would live forever. His half brother was a brilliant physicist and a hopelessly inept human being, but he was capable of slicing and dicing atoms like a cordon bleu chef chops vegetables.

It was this affinity with atomic structure that Angstrom needed, so he had begun taking drastic measures to control his half brother’s chronic wanderlust. After all, his debilitating physical condition would never have appeared if Leitz had not been born. The laughter he had been choking back suddenly burst forth, and tears of joy began rolling down his cheeks. Leitz had stolen his legs on the day he had been born, and now he was going to return the favor, by stealing the fool’s brain.

***

As a child Kurt Angstrom had everything: he could walk, run, ride a bike, climb trees, do all the things that kids do; the present was endless and the future promised to be a joyful eternity. He was, of course, unaware that he was the product of an explosive love affair between two radical idealists who had collided in the slipstream of life, or who perhaps had been caught in a net of impish energetic intrigue that neither could understand.

His father was a rogue behavioral scientist who traveled the country promoting a novel theory he called ELECTROMANCE, and his mother was a sucker for any new paradigm she thought plausibly laced together by hard scientific fact. His father had written a book in which he claimed to have invented a meter that was capable of measuring the combined ELECTROMANTIC field of a man and a woman, and this instrument, he stated, could also predict how perfectly any couple were matched to one another, while also indicating the mental capacity of their offspring. How daring they’d be, how handsome and how kind they’d be, and it was these simple facts his mother had found most intriguing indeed.

Having read the book, she attended a lecture and signing at a local fringe society function, and hanging back afterwards she grilled the author about his invention. Feeling her interest was both fierce and fervent, he obligingly invited her for a free demonstration of the sensitive equipment. She blushed repeatedly when he included her in his ad hoc experiment, and when he pointed out enthusiastically that their own ELECTROMANTIC field was exceedingly strong she went beet red. But when he whispered to her that the intelligence, physique, and moral strength of their potential offspring would make them unbeatable, she was convinced—and nine months later Kurt Angstrom was born.

When little Kurt was five years old she became entranced with a physicist she’d met at the same bookstore. He had a wild theory about parallel dimensions that drifted through historical time—worlds within worlds—and he invited her back to his motel room so that he could reveal their portals to her. That afternoon it seemed that she disappeared for an exceedingly long time, and when she came back she could have sworn that she’d been to the very center of the universe. A universe that had whispered the deepest mystical secrets of life to her, and strangely enough, nine months later, Aaron Leitz was born.

Angstrom was mortified when this sibling appeared, and he sank into a deep depression. He took to his bed where he sobbed and cried endlessly, until one day he awoke with a raging fever. When the fever finally subsided, however, he found that he could no longer move his legs; he was paralyzed. He blamed the interloper, and he withdrew into his own world where he listened to voices in his head—voices that soothed him and told him what he wanted to hear. They became his best friends, and it wasn’t long before he wouldn’t do a thing without consulting them.

Now, for the very first time in his life, he needed his half brother in order to begin work on his new plan to reverse the effects of his paralysis, but Aaron Leitz was missing. It was nothing new; he had been going off by himself since he was a child, and it was this solitary devotion to losing himself that made him a brilliant physicist. He would get something in his mind—a problem that needed solving, for instance—and once there he would concentrate solely upon it until it was solved. He wouldn’t eat, and he would sleep wherever he was; unfortunately, this tendency sometimes made him very difficult to find.

After many years of wondering what to do about his half brother’s delinquency, Kurt Angstrom had stumbled on a solution deep in the Amazonian rain forest. While studying native cures for all sorts of ailments, he had been captured by a very fierce tribe of cannibals who’d wanted to eat him. But their witchdoctor had suggested that if anyone were to eat him they may inherit his paralysis. Upon hearing this warning, the most ferocious warriors imagined their offspring hunting and tracking through the forest on wheels. It didn’t hold the allure they were used to, so they lost interest and wandered off to find someone healthier.

But the witchdoctor was intrigued with the man on wheels and he took him under his wing, sharing vast amounts of secret knowledge about strange mysteries in return for cigarettes, candy, and syringes—which he used to make colorful tattoos. The witchdoctor knew many secrets, and one magical insect in particular turned out to be the answer to his half brother’s wandering problem.

One day, sitting in the witchdoctor’s hut trying to make sense of the vast array of plants hanging along beams and down the walls, he came across an odd-looking bug in a small pot. As he stared at it he asked what it was used for. Glancing up at him from a pile of bones he was divining, the witchdoctor told him it was a control worm, and it was used to keep troublesome tribesmen in check. The worm was given to a person in egg form—say in a drink—then it would hatch and live quite happily roaming the host’s intestinal tract as long as it had a steady supply of its favorite food. But if it didn’t get the food, which also came from the rain forest, the worm would secrete a vile liquid that would go straight to the brain, causing the victim to go temporarily insane until its favorite meal was forthcoming.

Kurt Angstrom sat there stunned, and as the tumblers clicked in his mind he realized this was the answer to his half brother’s wandering problem. Back in New York he secretly administered the control worm egg to Aaron Leitz, and he synthesized a batch of the food. Then he waited for the inevitable disappearance, which happened two days ago.

***

As Angstrom mused about his plans for the future, a limousine pulled up at the 59th Street entrance of GLOBAL ELIXIRS INC., and a stunningly beautiful Asian-American woman climbed out. She leaned over to speak to the driver, whose massive shoulders and shaved head seemed to indicate he was more than a
chauffeur.

“Wait here, Mister Hunter,” she said. “We’ll be going out again.”

“Sure, Miss Moon,” he replied casually.

Miss Amelia Moon, graduate of Vassar, was a ninth degree black belt in karate, and Kurt Angstrom’s personal assistant. Her round face was framed by short black hair and her bangs softly caressed the thick black lashes surrounding dark brown, inscrutable eyes.