The Totally Secret Origin of Foxman (2 page)

“A boy your age should be getting out more, going to movies, dating … You could use the 'vette.”

“No!”

“It's a new car, Rand, and it's got your name on the title…”

…And a mostly empty engine compartment—not that I wanted her to know that. “I will
never
drive that car.”

“Look, just because your dad and I got a divorce doesn't mean you have to cut him out of
your
life too.”

“I am
not
having this conversation again,” I growled as I stuffed tools into my backpack. “No, Mom.”

“Rand, he could do so much for you.”

But I was already going out my window. I used one foot to pin my skateboard to the roof of the shuttered warehouse that butted up against our apartment building, while I closed the window. Then I tipped the board onto the steep slope and shot away. At the edge of the roof I kicked up the nose and dropped six feet onto the top of a shipping container in the fenced-in yard of the warehouse. My wheels barely touched down before I was across and taking the next drop onto the concrete.

In a normal winter I would have had to shovel my way from there to the back door of the battered old building, but it had been unusually warm this year with repeated cold rains wiping out the snow. There was ice, sure, but surprisingly little for late November. As I got closer to the door, I hit the button on the garage door opener clipped to my backpack and, hey presto, I was inside.

The noise of my wheels echoed weirdly as I rolled half the length of the enormous empty space on my way to the old office block. The padlock there was latched with the hasp open so that it couldn't be closed from the outside. That meant Michael had gotten in before me. No surprise on a Saturday. He was a morning person and I preferred not to get out of bed before noon. The outer office was quite warm—which told me he'd been there a couple of hours—and I could hear the sound of the old Singer industrial sewing machine I'd refurbed for him.

I poked my head into the room he'd taken for himself. “Whatcha working on?”

He never looked up from the machine or the dark velvety material he was sewing. “Got an idea for a formal-look duster. Can't talk.”

That was classic Michael. Slim and dark haired with a sardonic smile, he was incredibly intense about clothes in every possible way. They spoke to him. Thick wooden closet rods had turned the abandoned office into something like a giant wardrobe or drive-in closet, with thousands of outfits hanging there. Overhead racks blossomed with hats, and hundreds of pairs of shoes and boots stood beneath the clothing. Michael himself had on a fancy three-piece suit from some European clothier's—odd sewing wear for anyone but my best friend.

I'd met Michael at the extremely fancy private academy we both attended. My dad had paid for my schooling until recently, but I'd been on scholarship since the divorce. Michael's tuition was covered by the weirdest trust fund you could possibly imagine. His parents had been quite wealthy, if not in the same league as my dad, but they'd died when Michael was thirteen. Now he lived in a big mansion on Summit Hill with a butler he absolutely detested. The trust fund paid for that, his schooling, a modest allowance, any food he ate at home, and an unlimited clothing budget. The senior Damians' money had come from their international haberdashery empire and they'd left their fortune and their obsessions to their son, along with the deed to this warehouse.

I nodded at the back of Michael's head and wandered over to the room that had once been the warehouse's workshop. There on the bench lay the guts of the 'vette's fuel injection system which I was attempting to convert into the guts of a hydrogen peroxide rocket engine. I wanted to make it small enough to fit between the decks of two skateboards I'd also cannibalized for the project.

As I started my soldering iron heating, I ran a finger along my left eyebrow, feeling for the bare patch left by the little hiccup I'd had with the iron and some spilled rocket fuel a few weeks ago. It had started to grow back, but I liked to remind myself that A) caution is important, and B) any day working on rockets without a dangerous explosion was a good day.

…Time passed.

BOOM!

Oh well.

Once Michael helped me put out the small fire on my workbench, we decided to knock off for a bit and get some burgers.

*   *   *

The railway provided us with a little slice of urban wilderness mostly cut off from the city around it. We could sit on the brush-covered slopes out of sight of anyone official and do the sorts of things that teenage boys playing hooky have always done. There were bums around, sure, but we had something of a truce with the regulars. Besides, we were fifteen and sixteen—you know, invulnerable.

But tonight was different. Tonight we were going to test my rocket board. It was December fifteenth, around six p.m.—solidly dark and into rush hour. There'd been some real snow finally, which made the pavement into a death trap for a skateboard going a reasonable speed. Add in the rocket … yeah. Not going to happen. Not inside the warehouse either. I'd already had plenty of warning about the dangers of mixing rocket fuel and interior spaces.

That's how I'd settled on the railway. Not only was it clear of snow, but it was a perfect straightaway. I'd had to rig up a custom wheel set and a magnetic lock, but now the only way off that rail involved me hitting the toe release. That meant I didn't need to worry about turns or bumps or anything but staying on the board. Perfect!

Michael shook his head as I locked the board onto the rail. “I don't know, Rand. Don't you think this is kind of dangerous? Maybe an unmanned test first…”

“Don't worry. I've already tested the thrust on the rocket seventeen ways from Sunday. It'll barely get me up to fifteen miles an hour before it tops out. A bike goes way faster than that. If anything goes wrong I can jump clear easy. It'll be fine.”

“What about the bridge?”

“That's nearly a mile away. I don't even have enough fuel to make it that far. I'm going to go half a mile on rocket assist, max. I'll coast to a stop well short of the bridge. I've done all the math more times than I'd care to count.”

I was more nervous than that, but hell if I'd admit it to Michael. I
did
check the straps on my helmet and various pads one more time. I know I didn't mention them in the script version of this scene, but that's the movies, man. Safety gear isn't cinematic. I stepped up onto the board.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, crazy man!”

I poised the toe of my sneaker above the rocket engage, and …

The world vanished with an intense purple flash like the world's biggest black-light strobe firing off. For one brief instant I could see Michael's skeleton like a green framework within the translucent purple outline of his body—oddly, nothing else seemed to go translucent. But I barely registered that over a sensation that felt like someone pumping every cell in my body full of hydrogen and lighting it on fire.

KRAKOOOOM!

The sound of the Hero Bomb hit like summer lightning taking out the tree I was leaning on. If not for the sheltering banks of the railway, I think it might have knocked me off the board. Is it any wonder I accidentally stomped on the rocket ignition?

FWOOOOSH!

Instead of the fizzy noise I'd grown used to in testing, the rocket engaged with the full-throated roar of a fighter plane. I should have fallen off, but I could feel the board working with me, telling me what it was going to do and when. It sort of
gripped
my feet as well. Add in new and, as yet unrecognized, improved physical strength and reflexes and I stayed on. I must have been going close to a hundred miles an hour when I reached the bridge and saw the oncoming train.

Terror filled me and I stomped on the tail of the board. I forgot to toe the magnetic release, but it let go anyway—possibly in response to my unvoiced command. The rocket lifted me up … up … and I just cleared the front of that first car. I shot along the roof,
knowing
that I was going to fall between it and the next one and die. But then the board spoke to me again—pointing me at a possible out. Without thinking, I followed its direction, leaning to the right so that I sailed off the side of the car, hit a steeply angled girder, and rode it like the world's craziest skateboard ramp. My fuel ran out a few feet short of the end, but I kept right on going, rising up off the girder in a beautiful ballistic arc … that ultimately terminated in the cold black waters below.

Freezing! Drowning! Dying. Yet still burning with the cellular level changes the bomb had initiated …

Tumbling and twirling and passing out only to wake up on a narrow tongue of ice sticking out into a calm place in the turbulent waters. Somehow crawling to shore and staggering upright. Dragging myself homeward. Stopping briefly at the warehouse to steal a change of clothes from Michael's too abundant supply …

A mistake, that, in retrospect. A silly, stupid, childish mistake, that I would later compound hopelessly. But I didn't dare let my mom see what the fall and the river had done to my own clothes. There was no hiding the mud or the blood. She'd have grounded me for a million years if she caught me coming in wearing that, or found it later.

Michael was smaller than me, and most of his clothes were hopeless, but I noticed a cheap-looking suit on the end of one of the racks that seemed bigger than his usual choices. It was a little tight, and the fabric was in terrible shape—picked up at Goodwill for parts probably—but it would do enough for decency's sake, and it wasn't covered in river muck and my own blood.

I blew out both shoulders of the jacket climbing onto the shipping container, and ripped a knee open on the brickwork below my bedroom window. Then the zipper stuck as I was trying to get out of the pants, and I had to break it. I felt pretty bad about what I'd done to my borrowed wardrobe, but I was shaking and burning and freezing all at the same time. I couldn't think or see straight, and once I'd stripped off the ruined clothing, I dropped it out the window so my mom wouldn't find it and wonder. Then I fell headlong into bed.

*   *   *

“Rand, honey, are you finally coming round?” I felt a cool touch on my forehead.

I remember vaguely thinking Mom must have popped the lock—easy enough with a screwdriver. She normally respected my privacy, so something important must have happened.

“Mmm, fine. Jus' need a little sleep…” I started to slip back into dreamland.

She caught hold of my shoulders. “Honey, you've been sleeping for nine days!” Before I could even think to respond she pulled me up into a hug.

“I—What?!?” I forced my eyes open. “You're kidding, right?” But the look on her face said she was anything but.

“No. I wish I was—”

Her mouth kept moving, but I couldn't hear a word she said over the ringing in my ears. You see, I had finally looked past her face to see the room around me. It was my bedroom, but not the one in the apartment. It was my old room in the Hammer mansion up on Summit Hill.

“You didn't go to Dad for help just because I was sick, did you?” It would have hurt her terribly to have to do that. “I'm so sorry.”

“No, Rand. I didn't go to your dad.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Because there was more room for the doctors to set up and come and go as they needed in your house than in my apartment.”

“I … What do you mean, my house? You know I don't want to live with Dad.”

“Honey, there's no easy way to say this … Your father is dead.”

“What? How?” I felt suddenly hollow, empty at my core where the fiery ball of rage I'd built for my dad collapsed in on itself, leaving nothing behind but an icy void. He couldn't do this to me. We hadn't settled anything yet!

My mother kept talking. “There was a bomb … a sort of radiological bomb.”

“Like a nuke? Was that what that flash was? I could see Michael's bones right through his flesh!”

“Something like a nuke, yes. It took down the I-94 bridge, but they say that was only because of the priming charge. The actual radiological effect didn't do physical damage to anything, but it killed … Well, a whole lot of people, hundreds of thousands.”

“Oh my God!”

“Hang on Rand, let me finish, because there's more and it's really important. They're saying the death toll was … asymmetric. Some people who were fifty feet away from the blast were completely unaffected. Some who were fifty miles away were killed. Others, a very small number of others, were … changed.”

“Changed, how? And what's that got to do with me?”

“You wouldn't wake up, so I called nine-one-one. When the paramedics tried to move you, you picked one of them up with one hand and threw him across the room. They radioed it in and less than ten minutes later a helicopter arrived. There was a woman in it … a very strange woman. Her hair was green and gold, like those circuit boards you're always taking apart. She had more gold tattooed across her cheek, like a circuit set right into her skin, and her eyes…
brrr
.”

My mother hugged herself and shivered. She looked frightened, and that terrified me. I'd never seen my mother scared of anything, not even when she was fighting my dad's legions of flesh-eating lawyers during the divorce.

“She put a little blue box on your forehead. After a minute or so it beeped and a green light turned on and she nodded at the paramedic. ‘He's one of ours all right, get a gurney and load him on the chopper.'”

“‘Like hell!' I said.”

“Then what happened?”

“I was about to put my body between you and the door when your father's lawyer walked in.”

My father had about a zillion lawyers, but only one that my mother would refer to as “your father's lawyer.” Marcus Hamilton was Lucifer in a pin-striped suit and my father's personal pet devil.