33. Not Another Super Who Wants to Kill Me...
I didn't want to fight back. Maybe if it wasn't Josh. If it was another masked supervillain, one who wasn't my best-friend. Former best-friend. Sure, he might have joked/been semi-serious about pushing me off a building, called me an idiot and at first had been mostly unsupportive of me for wanting to use my powers for good - but he wasn't evil. Was he? Even if he was, there was no way that I could bring myself to raise a fist against him.
"GET OUT OF HERE!" Josh screams at me. He throws his hand up towards me and a small, plain end-table flies up from beside his bed and spirals through the air, throwing its contents - stacks of bandages and dressings, a little cup of water - onto the floor as it heads right for my head. Too slow to duck or roll out of the way, I raise my arms to shield my face, crying out in pain as the wood bends and splits as it impacts, little splinters tearing into the flesh of my arms. The table breaks as it rebounds, pieces of timber smashing into the floor. Super-strength stopped my arms from breaking, but it didn't stop the wood from cutting up my skin as it shattered to pieces.
"Hey, what's going on in there?" calls the nurse, her shoes echoing across the floor as she quickly walks towards the door.
"Shit," I say as I lower my stinging arms, blood already welling up and beginning to stain the skin. I meet Josh's blue eyes from across the room, full of hatred, for reasons I barely understand. I spin on my heel and run out the door, almost crashing into the nurse as she races towards the scene. Also, Julia, as she re-emerges from the bathroom, her eyes red from crying, her makeup uneven in a vain attempt to fix it.
"Tim?" she asks, with a sniff. "Sorry, I just couldn't..." she trails off, furiously trying to blink away tears. "Did you see Josh? How is he?"
Josh answers this one for me, screams of rage exploding from his doorway. "Help! Assault! Nurse, somebody, help me!" What is Josh playing at? He was the one trying to assault me!
"Oh no," the nurse cries, "that poor boy! He was hurt enough! What did you do?" I gulp, not knowing how or what to say in response. She doesn't wait for an answer, just runs right into Josh's room, stepping carefully over the debris on the floor.
"Tim." Julia looks at the ripped and teared skin of my arms, then the remains of the smashed table on the floor in Josh's room, her eyes quickly flicking between the two.
"You poor thing." The nurse coddles Josh inside the room. She has good intentions, but her high pitched, baby like voice is starting to get on my nerves. That and thanks to Josh, she is probably only moments away from running out screaming and calling security on me. "Someone has unwrapped all the bandages from your face!" She continues to verbally freak out, dashing around the room, trying to find where his bandages went.
"He..." I start to talk to Julia, my words dissolving as I struggle to find the right ones to explain what is happening.
"What happened to Josh!" She starts crying again, her face transforming into a watery mess. A hot, watery mes- Tim, stop it. "What happened to you?"
"He..." I can hear Josh's voice echoing behind me, as we simultaneously cry out the same sentence. "He tried to kill me!"
Before Julia can react, the nurse rushes out again, frightening me by grabbing hold of my arm with a tight grip, just above the elbow.
"Young man..." she begins, before yelping and letting go of my arm in shock -- yes in shock, because, damn it, I wasn't expecting her touch and just jolted her, blasting electricity into her hand. She takes a step back, her leg wobbling, unsure of what to do. "Security!" she yells. Oh for the love of... "SECURITY! SOMEBODY CALL SECURITY! A BOY WITH SUPERPOWERS IS ATTACKING THE PATIENTS!"
Oh man. Way to jump to conclusions. Could this situation get any worse? Well, knowing my luck, it probably can. I'm not sticking around to find out. "Julia, look," I say, turning to her. "I'll explain what's going on later, okay? I've gotta go." I move to step around her, planning on exiting this hell-house as fast as I can, whether that means running down flights of stairs or jumping out of a window.
"No!" she cries, stepping into my path of escape. "That's not okay. Tell me what you did! What is going on?!"
The nurse continues to yell something at me, but I can't translate the sounds into words. Too much going on at once, I can barely focus on the sound of Julia's voice. What I did? I did nothing. I'm just as confused as her. All I know is that Josh, injured in an accident, has suddenly developed superpowers and a murderous hatred for me. Or has he always hated me? I don't want to think about it. I just want to leave this place and never come back. Wake from it, like a bad dream.
"Tim?" she asks again, seemingly alarmed by my lack of response.
I come back into focus, blinking slowly. "Well..." I begin. "Er..."
"Hey!" calls a new voice, from an adjacent hallway. Deep, masculine. Sounds awfully like it could be from the hospital 'security' that the nurse was yelling for. If I stick around, I'm probably going to be jumped on by an ex-heavy weight wrestler, with more abdominal muscles than all of the world's boybands put together. Not cool. But if I leave, Julia will probably hate me and be convinced by Josh to believe some made up story about me attacking him, like he has already appeared to have done with the nurse. Also, if I leave Julia here, what if Josh, for whatever messed up reason, ends up using his crazy superpowers to attack her, along with the rest of the hospital?
"Your brother has gone crazy," I say, finally answering her question. I grab her hand and tug on it, but she refuses to budge. "Julia." She turns to look at me, tears still leaking out of the corners of her eyes. "It's not safe for you here. We have to leave." She still won't come. "Trust me," I add.
The doors at the end of the corridor swing open and in leaps the security guard. He doesn't look quite as scary as how I imagined, but he is still buff, like a body builder, definitely not someone that I want to mess with. This is probably gonna be something to regret later, I think, before shifting my hands from Julia's arm to around her waist, hoisting her over my shoulder.
"NO!" Josh yells, from his side of the wall.
Suddenly, an invisible force blasts from the direction of Josh's room, throwing us and everything in the near radius into the opposite wall. I merely avoid landing on top of Julia as the wall between us and Josh flies apart, plaster and wood tearing into the hallway. She slips out of my hands and I hold up my now free arms in an attempt to shield us from most of the debris, as the wall explodes. It feels like someone detonated a bomb on Josh's side, destroying the wall as the blast slams us all in the opposite direction. It stops as soon as it starts, leaving me to shakily regain my footing, brushing the plaster out of my eyes.
I can see Josh again now, through the newly created hole in the wall, his hand outstretched. He grins as his eyes meet mine, his stretched red grin like something out of a nightmare. He was the one who destroyed the wall, throwing it apart with his mind.
"Run!" I yell at Julia, grabbing for her arm again. She doesn't need any convincing this time, following close behind as I leap over piles of wood and plaster, rubble from what was, several seconds ago, just another wall.
"After those kids!" the security guy yells, tailing us as we sprint around the corner, pushing through a set of heavy doors into another ward. Julia follows me through more corridors and around more corners, losing ourselves (and hopefully any pursuers) in the maze of white walls and doorways. But just as I begin to think we might have finally evaded him, we reach a dead end, the only surrounding doors leading to patients' rooms. One is slightly open and I see it is unoccupied, so I pull Julia in with me, closing the door behind us.
"What the hell just happened?" Julia asks and I shrug, not knowing much more than she does.
"For some reason your brother thinks his accident is my fault," I quickly explain. "He now hates me and seems to want to kill me. Oh and he has superpowers."
"This is crazy." She sniffs, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and further ruining her makeup. "Unbelievable. Why would he..."
"I don't understand it either," I reply, looking around for something for her to wipe her face with. I see a clean, folded cloth of some sort and offer it to her. She smiles and accepts it with a look of gratitude. "Yesterday," I continue, "when I last saw him, he was his normal, joking self. This morning even, when he texted me to try and convince me to fly him to school."
"Fly him to school?" Julia laughs a little at that, her hand wobbling as she quickly works to remove the worst of her makeup. "That sounds a lot like him."
"Yeah, so because I refused to do that, he got hit by that truck or whatever and now..." I trail off, trying not to think of the now part.
"It isn't your fault," she assures me, placing a hand on my shoulder, then wincing as she quickly pulls it away. She must have forgotten that I'm practically a live wire. "So my brother is... what, evil now?"
"I think so," I answer, wincing as she bursts into tears again. I awkwardly place my arm around her, trying to offer some comfort. But before I can think of anything soothing or calming to say, I hear the voice of the dreaded security guard outside the door, asking the ward's nurse if she has seen or heard us. Julia and I break apart, as I frantically look around the room for an escape route. Across the room, on the other side of the clean, perfectly made and white sheeted bed is a window, but the glass is protected behind several steel bars, each about a foot's width from each other. The bars probably have something to do with stopping a patient or a nurse from accidentally (or otherwise) falling or tripping into the glass, breaking it and tumbling out the window. Sadly for me, that was actually my plan.
I quickly run to the window and place my hands on the bars, testing their strength.
"Tim," Julia begins to speak from behind me, but I ignore her, concentrating more on the steel in my hands and the security out in the hall, only a few seconds from finding and surrounding us. I pull up on the bar and for a moment it feels like it isn't going to give, but then it does, easily bending to my strength. Several seconds later and I've made a gap large enough for us to climb through, so I raise my leg and kick out the glass, cracks shooting up and sending the whole pane cascading down like a waterfall, glass pieces smashing all over the floor, as well as out into the pavement far below. Warm air flows into the room from outside, a massive difference to the cold air conditioning of the hospital.
Unfortunately, the noise from the glass attracts the attention of the security guard and he shoves open the door, yelling at us as he races into the room, followed closely by a posse of other guards, who he has somehow managed to pick up along the way. Thinking fast, I grab Julia, hopefully not too harshly and leap into the air, flying through the gap and outside into the warm air.
--
Julia doesn't want to go back to her family's apartment, so, not knowing what else to do, I just take her back to my place, flying away from that damned hospital as fast as I can.
Mum freaks out as we stumble in the door. Luckily, I don't need to explain anything to her, she just grabs the first aid kit and tosses it to us. Julia is silent on the couch next to me as I use the tweezers to pull all the splinters out of my arms, wincing as mum wipes the cuts with an alcohol wipe.
"Are you alright?" she asks Julia, who just shrugs and turns to look at the wall. Mum stands up - having finished torturing my arms - and briefly flicks her eyes in my direction. Comfort her.
"Julia." I turn to her, not knowing what I can say or do to help. Josh was my friend - but that's nothing compared to her. Josh was her twin brother.
"Can you tell me everything?" she asks. "That happened while I was in the bathroom? What did you do? What did Josh do?"
I tell her in as much detail as I can remember, leaving out the embarrassing parts, about me liking Julia and so on. She shakes her head as I finish, probably not wanting to believe it.
"Josh... this is crazy. He is really evil now, isn't he?" I nod. "I don't understand. I wish I could say that he is just overreacting, and that he will just blow it off later... but it is real, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I reply.
"What can we do?" she asks, to which I shrug.
"I don't know. I don't even know what to think anymore."
"Thanks, by the way," Julia says, with a small smile. "For saving me again."
I shrug it off. "I don't think Josh would have purposely hurt you..."
"I don't know," she answers, frowning. "Anything is possible. He is crazy."
We sit in silence for a few minutes, thinking over her words and the day in general. It started off so good... I bumped into Anna in the hallway at school and somehow managed to score myself a date. Julia called me and I didn't think too much of it. But then, I got to the hospital... to find out that it was much, much worse than I could ever imagine. Josh... It was bad enough that he was horribly injured. But now, horribly injured and wanting to kill me...
It wasn't really my fault, was it? I mean, I could have easily flown him to school... It wasn't too much of a ridiculous request, was it? If I did it, I would still have a best friend. Not another super who wants to kill me. Does this really mean Josh is evil now? Will I have to fight him? I don't think I could handle that. Maybe if Josh really wants to be evil and destructive and powerful and stuff, he could go find another city to do it in? Or even better, he could not do it at all. Or, I could find someone with the power to time travel me back, so I could stop myself from screwing everything up in the first place.
"I think I should go home," says Julia, breaking me out of my thoughts. I nod, wondering whether or not I should offer to walk her home. "Er, maybe..."
"Do you want me to walk you home?" I ask, a blush quickly forming on my cheeks.
She smiles in return, looking down and away from my eyes. "Thank you. But no, I should be alright."
"Stay safe," I say, as she walks down the stairs.
She turns back towards me at the bottom, smiling up at me. "I'll try."875Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQenDcU77ZD
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I spend the next few days in an endless routine of waking up, trying not to think about Josh, going to school, talking to Anna, trying not to think about Josh, going home, trying not to think about Josh and then sleeping. During the 'trying-not-to-think-about-Josh' periods, I find myself taking up an unhealthy obsession of looking up Ghostanna on the web. For some reason, I've managed to convince myself that Anna is probably her, which isn't good, as it means I'm gonna be really disappointed when I find out that it isn't or that it can't be her.
But there is just one thing that doesn't make sense and that I can't get out of my head. Before I asked her on our date, when I asked her about her bruise... if she did really get it from being 'bumped into at the supermarket', then why would she slip up and 'accidentally' say that it was some crazy super? Because it WAS some crazy super. That Pyro-chick, to be exact. Whose name I looked up, and discovered to be 'Pyrola'.
I am kind of nervous about going on this date to be honest, expressly if Anna actually is Ghostanna. On the night before, I end up giving in and asking Mum what she thinks of my theories, even though probably already knows, having had to spend the better part of the week hearing me as I mentally compiled them.
"I don't think you are right," she answers, surprising me as she makes dinner. "I don't know this Anna girl any more than what I can get from you, but I don't think it's her."
"Why not?"
"I think you are putting too much thought into this," she answers. "I mean... I don't know for sure either, it could be within the realms of possibly... but I think it's very unlikely. The odds are very low. There are many other girls in the city and Ghostanna could be any one of them."
I sigh, knowing she is probably right.
"I still think you should be careful tomorrow, though."
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"I mean," she answers, giving me a careful look from over the top of the pot she is stirring. "What if this Anna girl does end up being someone else? Having an entirely different identity. I'm sure she is actually a nice normal girl and doesn't have any intention of hurting you - but be careful, all the same. Keep your guard up. Don't let her hurt you."
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