Chapter 4

At least when I awoke this time my brain wasn’t still on fire, complaining at me! Unfortunately, I was bound by my hands and feet to a hospital bed by sturdy leather straps. I was apparently being held as a prisoner somewhere ... but for once, this time after being captured by the authorities, I rather liked my odds of not ending up in prison. I didn’t care where they were holding me; the chances were going to be very good that I’d find a way out of here!

On the plus side, with a slight turn of my head I could see Pilsner in the hospital bed next to mine. That was very encouraging!

On the other hand, glaring at me from the foot of my bed and entirely too pleased with himself, seeing me all strapped down and helpless, was our old pal Drake ... or rather what was left of him. He still resembled something like a volcanic skeleton, with glowing veins of molten rock and reddish black ash covering his bones and naught much else for sinew or flesh. He radiated heat and flame, but erratically, perhaps not entirely yet of his own accord. Like the golden men, he had been augmented and changed by something not of this world, but now in an apparently quite flawed process. The golden liquid energies had been altered, corrupted perhaps even, by the massive solar and nuclear energies of Atomic Girl and her equally astounding daughter.

Overall, I couldn’t say that the changes in Drake were any bit for the better. Wisely, perhaps because I was still a bit doped-up, I kept that unhealthy thought entirely to myself.

“It’s all your fault!” I heard him say, his flaming skull and jaws flaring up with molten fury as he somehow found a voice with which to speak. “I was supposed to be transformed, made perfect, altered into some flawless ultimate warrior ... and you can see instead what I have become! What you have made me, because you were too slow!”

Rationalizing with an obviously insane super-villain is nearly always a losing proposition. They’re all crazy ... especially newly created ones. It’s nothing but crazy talk and they’ll try to bring you down to their demented level and try and beat you with their greater experience with irrationality. The odds were, I was immediately certain, that he wasn’t going to kill me now while I was lying here helpless, or harm Pilsner either, who was obviously even more medically unfit to even stand, let alone face him down or defy him in any way.

No ... instead Drake was going to do what villains did best when dealing with a helpless arch-enemy. Gloat.

“No, you were all in on it right from the start,” he again muttered, wringing his flaming hands together as he ranted, “the two of you, and of course Connor ... all jealous of me and trying to hold me down. He wanted me to fail! To be killed like all of the rest of the weak failures! I was supposed to become a golden man ... invincible, and perhaps even immortal! I was promised!” He wailed.

“But you were the one whose will at the very end failed. Look Drake ... I’m as genuinely sorry as can be for what happened to you, but put the blame where it all belongs ... on yourself! Pilsner and I pulled you up from the sand and the prize was yours, right there in front of you for the taking ... but you were the one who was too weak, feeble in both spirit and body to take that last damned bloody step forward to doom yourself to probably damnation. That was your choice... yours, Drake ... and face it, it was there, just inches away from your grasp ... but you were apparently inadequate after all.” I calmly replied.

He wasn’t going to hear any voice of reason, at least here and now, but I hoped that some of my words would stick, somewhere inside that molten skull of his, planting seeds of doubt to grow from within later on in the future. My best odds for getting rid of him without incurring any additional medical mayhem was to be truthful and blunt. Drake could always tell if someone was bullshitting him, or worse, spoon-feeding him crap because that’s what they’d thought he’d want to hear. In general, Antonio usually didn’t like hearing the bald unvarnished facts, but he also could usually respect that you’d had the balls to shoot the whole works and be straight with him.

“I was promised!” He again wailed at me, throwing bolts of molten flame wildly about the room in his uncontrolled rage. Luckily, none of the small fires he started threatened either Pilsner or myself, at least for now.

“You were promised just a chance,” I reminded him, to face hopeless odds and near certain death, and as far as that goes Drake, you succeeded. You survived and the opportunity was yours, right there for the taking. You tried for that fabulous brass ring thinking that it would become gold in your hands. Well, that fabulous prize ... it was just brass, right from the start. Me? I’d have taken just one look at that golden liquid energy vortex and run ... or at least crawled my ass as far away from it as fast as I could manage. Nothing... nothing at all good was certain to have come from it. Even if you had become a golden man, would you even still have been a true man at all afterwards, inside? I’m nearly certain that some nasty alien nether-creature was there waiting inside for you to submit yourself to it. You’d have been altered all right, but not into anything that still had a human brain, heart or a soul! You’d have become just a robot, some weird alien construct fabricated by Fate and bound to your flesh to do his bidding ... mindlessly forever after. Was that what you were really promised Drake? I doubt it. Besides, you saw what happened to those two other chumps that changed? The heroines creamed them ... turned them right into chowder right before your eyes.”

“Stop that!” he wailed, “And don’t call me Drake anymore! You’re right ... there was something else there in that sphere. Something strange and alien ... something unnatural. It was hurt, damaged when the energy bolts from those bitches struck it and it too began to burn and die, even as it engulfed me. It was damaged, nearly broken and I am now part of it, and it is now a part of me as well, both of us damaged ... forever burning, and never again to be a part of perfection. That is what I... we, have now lost!”

“Lost?” I remarked, “Hell, buddy ... I think you threw it away all by yourself when you cheated that Lady back at the Arcade, stealing that silver dollar from her! Chances are, that’s exactly what screwed up your luck! Fate or Karma is now punishing you for that Drake... why the hell did you cheat her for just a lousy old silver dollar?”

“It was mine, I knew that I had to have it! It shall all be mine now! And you may call us Fire Drake now, and through us, we will make them all burn and suffer! Fate, Connor, the entire Syndicate, you ... and everyone will all pay, just as we burn and suffer. The fools here, they tried to capture me too, but they have failed! Enjoy your time in prison, saps and know that when I see you next, that all of the Westside ... and then the island and then at last all of Megatropolis shall be mine ... or else nothing shall remain but burnt ruins!”

Now that his helpless foe had been thoroughly taunted, the flaming being now known as Fire Drake blasted his way back up through the hole in the stone ceiling, flying up like a burning torch just as he had apparently entered, leaving behind a molten tunnel of glowing rock heading apparently out to freedom. He was done with us ... and frankly I really couldn’t see why we were even worth those five minutes of his time. After all, he had all of Empire Island and then the Boroughs to torch and conquer, probably in that order. Chances were that guns, even lots of them, weren’t even going to slow him down now.

It would have been nice if he’d come or gone via the doorway, or burned his way through a few of these walls, but I was quite happy enough just to see him gone. Still, he did have the right idea about one thing, anyway. It was about time that we all blew out of this hospital! Since I couldn’t fly out through the ceiling, I was going to have to make my escape the old fashioned way.

I started to focus my attention on my wrist restraints, betting almost certain odds that at least my left hand could be fairly easily slipped out of it. Quite; it slipped loose almost at once and a moment or two later I had my right hand released and I was just reaching down to undo my foot restraints when I weakly heard Pilsner’s voice calling to me.

“Chancer, is that you?” He weakly gasped, “I thought for certain that I heard Drake’s voice here somewhere too. Raspy though ... I bet he probably inhaled too much smoke during the warehouse explosions. Is he still here? And did you remind him about the pair of C-notes he owes us for this little adventure?”

“Pils, old buddy, I think I can safely say that the chances of Drake upholding that bit of the bargain are precisely slim and none. Honestly, I don’t think there is a chance in seven hells that he’s going to pay up.”

“Oh ... well, that’s a disappointment then, to be sure.”

“Yeah, a bit ... but just maybe things are now starting to look up for us. Now shut your eyes again for a while and rest, while I try to find our doctor, or at least a pretty nurse in a crisp white skirt ... so we can check out of this grim hotel.”

“Oh ... well, that would be really nice too. I saw Doc Wilma earlier, and for an older dame, she’s really quite a dish. I proposed to her as a joke, but she said she’s already married, to the other head doc here.” With that, Pilsner’s eyes closed and he fell back into a drugged sleep. From the look of the half body cast on him, my buddy wasn’t going to be leading our hasty escape from here anytime soon.

Off in the background, probably from the hallway outside our secure hospital ward, I could hear sirens and other alarm sounds. Fire Drake’s escape, probably from a similar high security ward like this one, had set off all of the alarms. Hopefully the nearby security staff was now otherwise too busy handling that problem to pay much attention now to Pilsner and myself. Unless Fire Drake had turned them all into burn toast with his flames. Either way, that meant there was a good chance of us now getting out of here too!

Once the last of the restraints were gone I gathered myself up from the hospital bed, albeit a bit gingerly. My only garment was a thin hospital gown, and looking myself over carefully I seemed to have bumps, bruises and scrapes nearly everywhere, to gauge by all of the iodine stains and small bandages sticking to me. No major stitches or bandages, so nothing important seemed to be damaged or worse, missing. I was still a bit dizzy, probably from the drugs I had been kept under with, but after a few minutes of sitting upright once more, my head started to clear out and my legs could mostly follow orders once again.

I started by taking a quick look at the medical chart hanging at the foot of my bed, but it looked mostly like chicken scratching. I couldn’t hardly read, let alone comprehend most of what was scribbled there, but I was noted to be in good to excellent condition. The seemingly important part, circled in red ink just to be obvious to anyone reading it, was this brief notation: ‘Patient shows no infection from the alien retro-virus’.

Whatever that meant. I supposed that meant that Fate’s little golden ball of fun was indeed something really unnatural, and I was free from any traces of its burnt residue ... unlike Drake, who had been engulfed in the damned stuff! We’d all been brought here for observation, I supposed, but Fire Drake had been altered enough to manage his own sort of violent escape.

Pilsner’s clipboard held much more paperwork, several days’ worth of it, judging by the times and dates written on each report. None of them had anything to state that was especially encouraging, although the earliest initial medical reports suggested that the patient was in especially critical condition and unlikely to recover. At least that’s what the emergency room doc at Mercy had reported ... three days ago. The doctors here at this place, the following day, had increasingly more optimistic diagnoses. At least I saw the same annotation in red ink on today’s sheet, that Pilsner also was declared to be free from the retro-virus infection. That was very fortunate and more complicated medical trouble that we didn’t need.

Still, Pilsner was currently a very crippled man, with multiple complicated fractures of the hip, legs and spine. That was the worst part, from what I could read. Significant swelling in all of these body areas made any final prognosis’s premature, but the head doctor, a Wilma Reeds, thought the spinal nerve was damaged and that the patient was unlikely to ever walk again. Ouch!

Against nearly every odd, I’d created a new Reality in which my friend could live ... now apparently as a permanent cripple. That’s what his chances were ... as of now.

As for me, I wasn’t so pessimistic. Pilsner was a fighter ... and just maybe, perhaps, the odds from now on might be on his side. As for that name, Wilma Reeds ... well something about it seemed familiar but I couldn’t place it. Probably someone I’d once read about in a newspaper.

Apparently, a lot more time had passed since Pilsner’s near-death experience, early Sunday morning. I’d been out, unconscious and probably kept under sedation for nearly three days, from what I could tell by the report dates, the current Reality of Pilsner’s survival was going to be tricky to further adjust. I pulled up a chair next to his bedside and I clasped his good right hand and I began to concentrate hard. My head still was foggy, either from my past attempt to alter Pilsner’s fate or else from being drugged for three days, but we didn’t really have any more time to waste.

Focusing hard, I could see that the odds of tweaking a more favorable diagnosis were there ... but increasingly remote. Still, I decided that I had to try and do my pal a better service this time around. Pushing against fate by just sheer will wasn’t going to work. I’d learned this lesson earlier, that Time doesn’t like to altered at all, and further back I tried to adjust the chances of something happening, or not, the more difficult (and nearly impossible) the odds would get. Changing the Reality of something ‘right now’, here in the present seemed to be much simpler to do and I could adjust current odds and probabilities virtually at will. Molding Reality just like damp clay, and make it wag its tail like a happy puppy afterwards. But changing something that had happened in the past... again, was going to be long, hard and damned tricky!

Perhaps even still, the past could tolerate a few very gentle tweaks and nudges, but I was certain that if I tried to brute force my own entirely new flavor of a current Reality, days later, that Reality would likely brute force me right back, and probably win.

Besides, fixing Pilsner ... just one very unimportant man in the current scheme of Reality, really wouldn’t change the balance of fate for the rest of the world, hardly at all, in either the big or small picture of things. Or so I hoped. I was still learning how to use my gift, and utilize it (I hoped) wisely, but I felt that in this instance that there would be few, if any, real consequences. Now, if I had tried to rewrite ancient history, such as preventing the sale of Empire Island to the Dutch from the local Indians for a handful of beads, then that would likely be more meddling with Time than Reality could ever tolerate!

Incrementalism, once again, seemed the key. To find little small micro-fractional improvements to Pilsner’s condition, like tweaking out slight better chances for fewer and smaller, less violent bone breakages and faster healing. Slowly, one little statistical augmentation at a time. Just a wee bit less physical trauma here ... then there, and then a bit less internal bleeding. Slowly, I wheedled the crushed left femur and hip bones to consolidate into lessor fractures ... and finally, after what seemed to be hours later, just a few relatively simple breaks.

Given enough time and patience, they say that an ant can push a grape up an entire hill ... that feels exactly like what I had done. But, as of now, Fate would at long last cast a friendlier shadow over my wounded friend. No, Pilsner still wasn’t going to arise from bed and start dancing about, but his once crushed spine was now quite likely to be soon rediagnosed as merely a few simple minor vertebrae fractures which would heal with rest, once some minor back muscular swelling was reduced as well. The once shattered left hipbone was still a lingering, but less critical issue that I couldn’t adjust to my entire and complete satisfaction. I could coax it into consolidating into just a few relatively minor fractures, but beyond that point Time and Reality held firm.

As far as Reality was concerned, Pilsner was now an extremely fortunate man.

Perhaps I could try again sometime later on, but I was left with the distinct impression that at this Time, no Reality could be found (or encouraged) where my friend would make a complete, 100.00% full and swift recovery. I’d pushed the odds to their limit and I at last decided that to make even the slightest further attempt risked a host of other near certain disasters, the least of which was reversing all of the incremental progress I’d painstakingly made.

Reality, like rubber bands, could only be stretched out so far. Since the very real and statistically most likely alternative was for Pilsner to have been quite dead after the warehouse explosion, I supposed that indeed he was already a very, very lucky man, regardless of whatever happened in his recovery from now on!