"The Chill," by Brody McNellis

Marick planned out a route in his head that would get him to the diner just after it opened, if he used some alleys along the way he might be able to be the first one there. He turned down one street and up another, cut through an alley here and walked the wrong way down a one-way road there. When he was about four blocks from the diner he saw he had about twenty minutes before it opened. Perfect timing. Now he only had to roam around that part of town for a little while longer before he could get some sweet deliciousness inside him. He thought he heard someone yell, but he attributed the sound to the city in the morning. He got closer to the diner and thought he heard the yell again, this time he knew it was a yell. He couldn’t tell what they said. He could now see the diner from the sidewalk where he stood, lights on the inside of the building and an aroma that drown out the pale odor of the city. The open sign wasn’t on yet so he waited down the street for the neon sign to invite him in for breakfast. There was the yell again, “get off of him” Marick distinctly heard yelled from a young woman’s voice. He began to inspect the situation. He walked closer to the diner trying to hear anything more from the girl.

“You’re hurting him,” the voice was getting louder, “Stop it!” Then Marick heard a familiar sound from the direction of the girls voice, the howl of laughter and mockery that the wolf men had encountered earlier that night. Marick quickened his pace.

He was now standing at the entrance to an alleyway directly across from the diner. The chef in the diner pulled the dangling string on the neon light and invited the world in for some hot fresh cinnamon rolls.

“You’ll kill him!” screamed the girl.

“Maybe that’s the point,” growled the voice of The Alpha Male. Marick looked down the alley and saw the wolf pack holding back a girl while Alpha kicked a man in the stomach that was laying on the ground in front of her. The bell on the door of the diner dinged as the first customer of the day went inside. The girl threw back her shoulder and one of the dogs lost his grip. She then threw her elbow back to catch the same man in the bridge of the nose. The man dropped to his knees in agonizing pain.

“Bitch broke my god damn nose!” The man screamed from his knees while holding his face.

“Well what’d you expect. You let her go, she breaks your nose. Did you think she was going to rub your feet for you when she escaped? Moron,” Alpha responded with disdain. He then walked over to the girl, “That wasn’t very nice of you sweetheart.” His left hand clenched into a fist and punched the girl in the side of the head. Her face was thrown towards Marick. The bell on the door chimed again.

The man with the broken nose rose to his feet and reclaimed his grip on the girl. Marick began walking towards the group of men. Not knowing what he was going to do when they saw him, he prayed that his presence would be enough to frighten them away. The bell sounded. Alpha’s foot connected with the man face on the ground. Blood spilled out of his mouth. The cuts and bruises on his broken face made him nearly indistinguishable as a person at all.

“Help!” the girl tried to yell in an exhausted voice, “please help.” Her voice grew weaker as she realized that no one could hear, or that no one cared. The girl had just accepted her fate.

“Let go of her,” Marick tried to make his voice as manly as possible. The pack looked up.

“Her?” asked Alpha, “you want us to let go of her?” His fist made its way into the ribs of the girl. The pack let go of her and she toppled over unconscious from pain. “There ya go, she’s free,” Alpha smiled at his funny little joke. The bell rang and Marick looked back to the diner to see two men in suites walk in. He returned his eyes to the pack to see that they had sicked they sights on him.

Run. The word jolted across Marick’s mind. He tried to run but his feet were frozen, either from the cold winter or from fear of the fight. The dog with a broken nose flipped a knife out of his pocket and Marick remembered that he had a sword strapped to his back. His feet were frozen but his hands still worked. He crouched down and put his hand on the handle of the sword, waiting for the opportune time to pull it from its sheath and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. The pack came closer and closer and began to circle around Marick. He pulled put his blade. It moved out of its holster more flawlessly than it ever had before, just as he had practiced.

“Ooooh,” one of the dogs howled, “Baby’s got a sword.” The rest of the gang pulled out switchblades and butterfly knives to retaliate against Marick’s Saber. A figure stood on top of the building and blocked out the light of the moon and the alley became darker than it had ever been. Marick was fully circled by the pack now.

“You really wanna do this kid?” Alpha Dog said as he stepped forward out of the darkness. “Eight blades to one,” Marick said nothing. “Fair enough,” replied Alpha dog to Marick’s silence, “Who’s first?” One of the men stepped forward out of the circle. He skillfully flailed a butter fly knife in his right hand, then he flipped it to his left hand and showed just as much talent with it. Marick remained steady. The man lunged and Marick ducked out of the way of his blade. The pack began to jump and cheer and howl. The dog then dashed towards him again with his blade held high. Marick spun to the side and pushed his own steel into the man’s leg. The man let out a yelp that could be heard from two blocks away. Marick froze in anticipation of the injured dog’s next attack. The man whimpered out of the arena to lick his wounds.

“Not too shabby,” Alpha complimented. “Would you like another round?” Marick wanted to say No but he kept his jaw clenched tightly. Alpha himself stepped back into the ring, a large Bowie knife in his hand. Marick heard the bell ring in the hushed silence of the gang as Alpha and Marick began to circle.

A rustling came from deep in the alley as the wounded girl regained consciousness and tried to rouse her Loverboy.

“Stop them,” Alpha agitatedly raised his hand and pointed back to the couple. The pack began to rush towards the couple to restrain them, leaving Marick and Alpha alone. This was Marick’s opportunity. He could catch Alpha while his guard was down. This could be his only chance. He gripped the handle of his blade with both hands and swung it towards Alpha dog with all the might he had. Alpha turned around just in time to see the WWII saber about to collide with his skull. He shifted right to avoid the blow, but the blade caught him in the upper deltoid just below the neck. Marick’s mind flashed back to a hunting trip he went on with his father when he was younger. Marick felt the steel cut through Alpha’s skin and go into the muscle of his shoulder. The shoulder was course, like cheap steak. He could feel the resistance of Alpha’s clavicle on the sword, he pushed harder to compensate. The rabbit he was hunting stopped when Marick’s arrow penetrated its side. With the extra force, Marick’s sword pushed through the shoulder like it was a fresh snow bank. Blood ejaculated out of the wound and shot like a geyser into the face of both Marick and Alpha. Blood spewed out of the side of the rabbit, it was a perfect kill shot. Marick could feel the steel of his grandfather’s sword cutting through tendons and ligaments, arteries and veins. His father was teaching him how to skin the animal when it let out one final squeal. Alpha tried to scream but couldn’t. The sword cut into the cartilage that held Alpha’s ribs to his sternum. Then the rabbit stopped. Then the blade stopped. Bone. Marick felt the metal collide with the bone in Alpha’s Chest. The thick calcium deposit of Alpha’s skelton was no match for all the power that Marick could muster. The blade lodged into the bone plate in the front of Alpha’s body. Alpha looked into Marick’s eyes. He saw the pain in Alpha’s eyes. Not just the physical pain, but the mental anguish. Alpha was thinking about all the things he would never do again, all the things he would never get to do at all. Marick felt the sorrow. Alpha fell to his knees still looking into Marick’s eyes. The bowie knife fell out of his hand and landed with a loud “thunk” on the ground next to him. The light of the rising sun illuminated the back of the alley. Dumbfounded looks came upon the faces of the wolf pack at the sight of their fallen Alpha Male. Some showed anger, some showed doubt, all showed fear. Alpha’s body fell onto its back and lay there with Marick’s sword still sticking up into the air out of its chest. Marick was still looking into the now empty eyes of the body that once contained Alpha. The pack fled into the depths of the city. The bell rang on the diner behind Marick.

The figure from the rooftop walked three fourths of the way down the building on the fire escapes. He moved silently, flawlessly. The figure could see Marick standing in a pool of Alpha’s blood, staring at the corpse that he had slain. The figure yelled down at Marick, but Marick was deaf to the world right now, all he could hear or see or feel was Alpha. The figure rolled his eyes.

“Bloody Hell,” he said to himself. The figure looked around and saw no one around except for the diner full of people eating cinnamon rolls and reading newspapers. He hopped over the railing of the walked down in the air. The wind became like a hill under his feet, the oxygen like stepping stones. He planted his feet on solid ground next to Marick’s.

“It sure is a good thing those guys didn’t decided to come after you, they could have come up yelling that they were going to kill you and you would have just stood there staring at that piece of meat on the ground.”

Marick’s eyes shifted to the figure, “He is a man, not just a piece of meat.”
“No, he was a man. But that was before you jammed that sword in his chest, now he is a pile of meat,” the figure spoke with a thick Irish accent.

“Who are you? Why haven’t you killed me?”

“Kill ya? Is that all that you can think about right now? Most people in this world don’t just go around killin’ people ya know, that is with an exception of you. I’m not going to kill ya. I’m here to help ya. We need to get out of here before the coppers show up. I just needed to wake you from your trance.”

“Coppers? How would they know already?” asked Marick

“I called em,” responded the figure matter-of-factly, “you obviously weren’t goin’ to help that dying man and broken girl back in the alley.” It’s true, Marick had forgotten about the make out kids that he had originally intended to save. They were still in the back of the alley. They were safe from the gang, but without medical help they were still going to die. Marick started towards the couple. “That might not be the best idea,” the figure interjected, “she probably wouldn’t be too comfortable with a hooded figure coming up to her right now. We might just want to leave this one to the P.D.” Marick stopped and thought then turned back to the figure.

“You never told me who you were,” Marick pointed out.

“Oh how rude of me. The name is Rumpelstiltskin, Andrew Rumpelstiltskin, but everyone calls me Stilts. I’m part of an group that helps people like you.”

“People like me? I don’t understand.”

“Heroes,” said Stilts.

“I’m no hero. This man is dead because of me,” Marick pointed to the still leaking body of Alpha. “He will never see the sun again, never hear music again, never feel the rain on his skin again, because of me. He’ll never see his loved ones again, he’ll never eat a steak dinner again, he’ll never…”

Stilts interrupted annoyed, “I get it! You killed him! He’s dead. He’s never doing nothin’ ever again. You can shut up now. We need to leave.” Red and blue lights began to flash on the street a few blocks down. The people in the diner looked out the window to see what was happening. “Get on my back,” Stilts commanded.

“What? No. My feet work fine.”

“They don’t work as well as mine, now get on my back,” Stilts persisted.

“I’m not...”

“Don’t make me knock you out. If you don’t get on my back the po-po are going to come down that alley mouth in about two minutes and throw your gang slaying ass in the slammer. Now, get on my back.”

Reluctantly Marick climbed onto Stilts piggy-back style.

“You’re heavier than I was expecting,” Stilts complained, “This is going to be more of a workout than I had planned.”

“I could just, ya know, use my legs,” suggested Marick.

“Don’t be stupid, we don’t even know if you’re capable of that kind of thing yet.” Stilts then proceeded to walk up the air like they were stairs. Up and up, each foot higher than the next. Marick passed out from shock and a small fear of heights.

Marick awoke to Stilts voice. “I carried his heavy ass all the way over here, Big Bear. I’ve never had someone pass out before. They usually walk after I get them out of the sticky situation, not this one. I carried him the entire way. Up a five story building and then nineteen blocks. Do you know what that will do to a guy’s back? I’m dying here, damn it. Have some empathy, or sympathy, or somethin’.”

Marick looked around trying not to gain the attention of Stilts.

“Do you remember when I found you Stilts?” said an unfamiliar voice that Marick could only assume was this “Big Bear” person Stilts referred to.

“I remember,” said Stilts.

“I found you covered in the man’s blood that your mother was sleeping with. Then I carried the man with a broken jaw, a fractured skull, a dislocated eye socket, seventeen stitches, three broken ribs, and a punctured lung to the hospital. The only thing that kept you from experiencing the kind of pain that Marick is going to struggle with is the fact that your victim lived.”

Marick sat up and looked at the two men talking. Big bear was a tall strong man. He had red hair and a short beard that was slowly turning gray from the bottom up. Marick stood about six inches shorter than Big Bear and about four inches shorter than Stilts. Stilts was lanky, but muscular and had the works of a white man’s afro growing on his head. “How do you know my name?” Marick didn’t recall telling Stilts his name.

“Son of a bitch!” The sound of Marick’s voice startled Stilts, “you almost made me crap my pants.” Big Bear almost acted as though he was expecting the words.

“How are you feeling?” Big bear asked.

“How do you know my name?” Marick pursued the question.

“This may be hard to believe, but I have developed the power to read minds.”
Marick thought that he must have gone crazy. He was sleep deprived, or lonely, or something. Nothing made sense. Had I killed someone? Why wasn’t I arrested? How did I get here? Where was here? Who is Big bear? Does he really expect me to believe he reads minds?

“I do read minds,” Big Bear stated interrupting Marick’s thoughts.

That was ironic of him to cut in right then, thought Marick.

“Actually the word you are looking for is coincidental. It is a common mistake to mix up ironic and coincidental. Irony is when events are contrary to what might have originally been expected to happen. Coincidence is a striking occurrence of multiple events at one time apparently by chance. This situation fits neither of those scenarios because I read your mind and was simply answering your question.”

Marick’s mind went blank.

“Just because you killed a man doesn’t give you the right to go all silent treatment on us, what are you thinking?” Stilts persisted to be rude to Marick for no apparent reason.

Killed a man. The words that Stilts had said echoed through the empty hallways in Marick’s mind. It was true, he took a man’s life. All the thoughts of what Alpha would never do again started flooding Marick’s thoughts.

“Say something!” Stilts was still screaming at Marick’s glazed over face.

“If you could see the hurricane you just sent his mind into you would know that you aren’t going to get a response out of him,” Big Bear informed Stilts of the flood in Marick’s head, “Oh, and he didn’t think anything about you. I was just messing with you. You really need to work on that temper of yours, Stilts.”

Overwhelmed with emotion Marick’s body did whatever it could to relieve itself.

Marick vomited. Marick vomited all over Stilts’ shoes. Then he passed out. Again.

This time when he woke up, it was just Big Bear in the room. He was at the far end of the room gazing out of a window that overlooked the city. The sun was rising onto the tired city.

“Nineteen hours,” stated Big Bear with no provocation from Marick, “you were asleep for nineteen hours the first time. You have a choice to make Marick, become the hero you have the power to be or fall back into the mundane of your old life. You have great ability hidden inside you and you tried on your own to unlock it. You failed and you took a life and that is a demon you will have to struggle with your entire life. You have the passion to help people, you just need to learn the best way to do that.”

“How can you read minds, and how did we get out of the alley without drawing the attention of the cops?” Marick spoke his first in hours.

“Well Marick, these are difficult theories to wrap your mind around. Let’s start with the easy question: How did you get out of the alley? Stilts can walk on air.”
“That’s the easy question?” Marick replied frustrated.

“Let me explain. Before I was known as Big Bear I was a professor at UCLA. Psychology. I had my students doing independent research on whatever they wanted. One of my students, a Rick Lighter, turned in research that he found pertaining to the affects of the manipulation of people to do animalistic things. He put fourth evidence of an experiment that happened only a few years earlier and only about five hours away from where we were. It was the Stanford Prison Experiment.”

“I’ve heard of that before,” Marick added his voice to show that he was listening.

“A lot of people have. What happened was Professor Zimbardo basically made a prison with volunteer students. Some students were prisoners, some were guards. The guards moved in and out of the week long study in shifts and the prisoners stayed there all the time. Just like a real prison. After just a few days the people that were assigned to be prisoners accepted that they were less than the guards and often suffered cruel and sadistic punishments. Likewise, the guards, who were good kind students, took the role of guards and did whatever was necessary to keep the prisoners in line. The prisoner students started a riot and the guard students used force and fire extinguishers to restrain them. Some guards even took extra hours to help keep the prisoners in line. This was highly unusual considering that the guards got no benefits whatsoever for the overtime to the study.

He brought forth further evidence from the American slave days. First hand experiences from slaves that said things like ‘if you treat a man like an animal for long enough he begins to think he is one.’ He quoted Fredrick Douglas right out of his diary, ‘Behold a man transformed into a brute.’ This showed how one overseer could control hundreds of slaves with little problems. The slaves had what was known as learned helplessness, they accepted the fact that they were slaves. That they were less than men.

Lighter wanted to use his research in inner city L.A. to see if he could get kids out of the hood. He felt like the main reason there was crime in those areas was because crime was expected to be in those areas. If a man gets shoot in Beverly Hills the whole world goes into dishevel, but if a man gets shot in Compton it’s just another day. He had a fascinating point.”

“I don’t understand how this study on learned helplessness helped you discover you have super powers.” Marick stated.

“I’m getting there,” replied Big Bear, “Like I said, his research fascinated me. The thought that if you tell someone something for long enough, they will start to believe it. I began doing similar research into this field. My research was more…personal. People always say that holidays are created by greeting card companies. I saw a movie once that said germs were a construction on soap companies. That before soap was invented no one worried about these tiny invisible creatures that would give you disease if you didn’t kill them with newest anti-bacterial product.” The word kill made Marick feel queasy as the memory of Alpha’s tissue tearing beneath his sword reemerged. “What if they were right? What if the only reason some things existed was because that’s what we have always known. It was tradition. This got me thinking, what if the only reason we are the way we are is because that’s what history told us we are. As humans we don’t use our brains to their full capacity. It is said that we only use ten percent of our brains. That’s not accurate, but there is brain space for growth. I tried to figure out what would happen by unlocking this mysterious ninety percent. I became known as a conspiracy theorist around campus because I started talking about how society was telling us lies and holding us back. I tried to get students to free their minds from the constraints of societies influence. I was terminated. Rick got in contact with me and we made theories and experiments and research. He was the only one that took my ideas seriously. We worked on a technique together to try to free our minds. It was a long process and many times we felt as though we were fighting a losing battle. Then one day I answered a question that Rick didn’t ask me, but that he was thinking about. Coincidental we thought, but I know I heard him ask me. A few days later it happened again, and then again. We slowly discovered that by freeing my mind I had developed the power to connect telepathically with other humans. This was an astonishing discovery that we decided to continue testing.
A few months later Rick could move things. He thought about things and they just moved. This was a shock to what were expecting. We figured that people just had a connectedness that allowed us to chat telepathically, but when Rick developed telekinesis that changed our hypothesis. Now we thought that the mind was a powerful tool that developed differently in different people. We needed another subject. We thought that the process would go faster in someone that was less cognitively developed, that’s when we found Stilts. We approached him, tested him, and told him our theory; he was willing to help. He went through the study and didn’t develop extra cognitive capabilities at all, but he discovered that he could manipulate gravity. He could walk on air like it was the ground. Upon the discovery that everyone has distinct abilities Rick and I began to argue. Rick wanted to tell the world about our discovery and let people grow, but I wanted to continue researching. We had no idea what these abilities were capable of, or what people would do if they developed certain powers. We split up. Stilts stayed with me so I could help fully develop and study his abilities, Rick went to tell the world. The world called him crazy, so he went crazy. He started doing the very thing that we were worried about. He was using his abilities to take advantage of other people. Luckily no one sided up with him. I haven’t seen hide or hair of him in months. He just disappeared. If things go the way I plan, you will be the newest person to be freed and come into the world of a new reality. Anyways, what do you think you were doing in that alleyway?”

Marick’s mind was flooded with thoughts of all the information that Big Bear had just fed to him. It took him awhile to get his thoughts into order.

“I just wanted to help,” explained Marick, “if I only could have stopped him another way.” His eyes became glassy as he thought of different ways he could have gone about not killing alpha. I could have made it turn out differently. I could have just called the police and gone to have my cinnamon roll. I could have gotten a group together. They would have been scared of a group.

“I can see your thoughts, you did what you thought was essential to your life and to the life of the couple you saved. Thanks to you only one person died instead of two, or even three.”

That doesn’t make it any easier.

“Nothing is going to make it any easier,” Big Bear’s honesty hurt. Nothing was going to make it easier. Nothing that Marick could do or will do could ever change what he had done. It was at that realization that Marick knew he would never be the same. He didn’t feel any different, or look any different, but he knew something inside of him shifted.

“Welcome to the other side,” Big Bear knew just as well as Marick of his metamorphosis, “We’ll begin training in the morning.”