Chapter 2: Oh Crap! He's dead!

Shakti, 16 year old genius and general cute girl. Never mention boobs to her! She had a sore spot for boobs. It was unfortunate that hers almost didn't exist. She stood, from red hair to bare feet, only 4 feet, but was told that she would eventually grow taller and fill out. She hated when people mentioned the 'fill out' part. Like they were all making excuses for her. She wears clothing that accentuate her child like looks, and tries to hide her intelligence as well as she can. She has perfected it to the point that most people think she's even younger than she truly is. After a bad experience with others, she decided that putting on the act of being a simple little child was probably the best, anyway. This way her life became more singular and insulated with the amount of time she spent at her aunt's place. She chose to live mostly with her Aunt, because her mother and her did not agree on many things and would often argue. It truly amazed her how different twin sisters could be. Her Aunt was the exact opposite of her mother, and even they would often get into disagreements. When Shakti heard about the incident with the guy hit and killed by the meteor, it was by her mother's words that she discovered the final truth of it.

The conversation with her mother started innocently enough after hearing about the death. She described it as 'That pathetic man acquired the treasure they had been trying forever to get', and 'That bastard deserved to die the way he did. He was good for nothing, anyway'

Something about what her mother was saying made her feel dirty and unpleasant. She listened carefully to anything her mother said from that point on, and when she heard the final conversation her mother had on the phone with her business associates, she decided to make the move to her Aunt's place.

Her Aunt, Helaena, was receptive to Shakti's request for lunch, and once she had arrived at the house and settled down for the light lunch, they began to talk. Shakti explained many things to her Aunt that she had heard, and asked many questions. It took no more than two hours to come to the conclusion it would be better to stay at her Auntie's home on a permanent basis. It was by the next day that Shakti ran into the nightmare on the path through the park. At first she thought it was someone who had been attacked by muggers. On closer examination she thought it might have been an animal attack. It was not until the guy opened up his eyes and looked at her that it struck home. She sent her neighbour's dog back to its house with a command, a part time job she liked to do. After a brief interaction with him, and then decided that this man needed to be protected. She could well see Mother becoming involved in an unpleasant way. She was excited about telling and showing her Aunt the very man that had been the center of parental controversy. Being cautious on the way back to the house was just logical, considering the state this man was in. It was obvious that he had really been horribly injured, and it was, to her mind, amazing that he was even able to recover to the degree that he had. She had a strong constitution, so nausea was not an option when she looked at him. She could not feel repulsed at him, just, she felt sorry for him and his situation. She worried about how he would deal with such a big change in his life. When she arrived at the house with him and her Aunt showed up she was shocked, surprised, and more than a bit frightened when he suddenly turned and bolted. It was also unfortunate when he bolted directly into the corner of the house and dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Shakti was also shocked at the amount of damage the corner of the house took with his impact. It would probably take a carpenter a whole day to repair the damaged beams and the green painted wooden siding. He struck it like a tank, and even made the entire house shake from the impact. He was deceptively built like a tank. They discovered how much like a tank when they tried to pick him up and carry him into the spare room, after checking him over to be sure he was not dead. His heart was still beating, no broken bones, not too much bruising, and just a small lump on his forehead. It took both of them struggling to even get him into a wheel barrow so that they could install him in the only room possible, a ground level basic guest room with a strong bed. Shakti and her Aunt estimated his weight had doubled since he was weighed at the coroner's office. He had weighed in at a grand total of 90 kg, but he wasn't that tall.

Shakti spoke about him with her Aunt, and was reassured that she did the right thing and helped him without involving anyone else. Helaena spoke many times with Shakti about the incident at the office. She provided the name of the man in the spare bedroom, Solomon Eris Freeman, but didn't give any more particulars, as she felt it was too private and wanted to speak with Solomon herself before handing any more personal information to anyone else.

Shakti spent most of her time in the spare room with Solomon, keeping watch over his unconscious body. She wondered what his life was like before the impact and death. Now that he was alive again, she knew that he would never be able to go back to his old life. She wondered what kind of person he was in his old life. She wondered if he had anyone in his old life that meant something to him, some emotional bond that would be missed if he remembered anything. Shakti wondered how deep his amnesia, went and just how much he remembered.

When Solomon woke up and she had the chance to speak with him, she felt that he was a kind and warm hearted person who genuinely cared about others. He seemed curious about his surroundings and the people around him. He just seemed a bit more disoriented than she expected. Granted he had been out of it for more than a day, so that could have been part of it. She made a joke about it using light sexual innuendo, but all it did was agitate him in a cute manner. She gave him what information she had about him, his name, and explained that she would look into getting more and then left him to rest a bit more. It was about 2 hours later that she popped in to check on him that she had the fright of her life. Apparently he had not only returned to unconsciousness, but something strange was happening with him physiologically. There was what looked like a thick coating of sweat covering his exposed skin, but it wasn't until Shakti stepped up close that she could see it was more of a sack of flesh like material covering him. She pulled back the sheets and blankets and examined him briefly, before she scrambled out and called her Aunt Helaena. Shakti stood waiting by the door, watching her Aunt examine Solomon carefully with many different instruments. She even went so far as to hook him up to a couple of monitoring units to monitor heart and brain function. The heart monitor would emit a quiet blip for each pulse of the heart, but as time went by the monitor slowed down and the blips became less and less, until one morning 3 days after his cocooning it became silent. The only indication of activity came from the wiggly lines on the display of the EEG showing brain function. The only sound heard in the room was a small sickly squishing sound, fluid in the cocoon moving about. The cocoon retained the rough shape of Solomon, but it covered him with a rust brown coating similar to dried blood. It was hard, like the stuff fingernails were made of, yet had a fibrous quality similar to hair. It almost looked like his body had rebelled and covered itself with a bit of everything. Quite frightening and more than a bit disgusting, Shakti refused to run away from what she was watching every day. Alongside her was Aunt Helaena. They watched together and hoped that what they were watching was not something they would regret. Neither knew what the eventual results were, but the closest they had for experiencing something like this was a bad science fiction movie from the 90's, and that had not ended well.