Falling Leaves

Cort’s release was far less interesting that he’d hoped for.  Two orderlies came in and unstrapped him, and then one of them asked him if he could get back to his room by himself.  Looking around fruitlessly for a wheelchair, Cort nodded and the orderlies disappeared so fast he expected a wind from air rushing in to fill the spaces they’d vacated.  Cort sighed a little, sure that this wasn’t really the kind of service he should be expecting given how expensive the Home was, and walked slowly back to his room.  On the way he had to walk past Fizz Mission’s room, and he paused outside her door.  Should he look inside?  Check that she was alone?

“That’s not your room, Mr. Stretch,” said a nurse coming up behind him.  A warm hand fell onto his shoulder.  “A couple more door, Sir, and you’ll be right there.  Who have you been visiting then?”

As she led him along the corridor he told her about his release, and she tutted and sounded shocked, made sure he was seated comfortably in his chair that looked out of the window, and then walked off again without ever telling him that she’d do anything about it.  He looked out of the window.  It looked into the courtyard, on the inside of the building.  He could see the other walls; the building was heptagonal for some reason, and he could see all of the other six sides.  Below was a grassy courtyard with a fountain, a tiny lake, and an equally tiny wooden bridge across the lake.  There was a small summer-house, and some white plastic chairs scattered around outside.  He’d sat down there in the summer, and it wasn’t quite as depressing at ground-level as it seemed from up here.  He sat up a little and squinted.  The lake was completely frozen.

“Icebro fell into it,” said a voice behind him.  He turned his head, hearing the bones click, and saw Dr. Madison in the doorway.  “He was with a nurse, so he wasn’t hurt and was pulled out quickly, but he still reacted to the shock by freezing the lake.  To be perfectly honest, I’m relieved.  I was worrying that he had lost his powers before that.”

“Why would that be a worry?”  Cort didn’t know Dr. Madison very well; only that he specialised in superheroes that had lost or were losing their powers, and also did most of the cardiac surgery when it was needed.

“Because lost powers don’t just disappear.  They go somewhere.  Sometimes they pass on to someone close by, and sometimes they become dormant somehow.  That’s dangerous because if they’re woken up by something, say by a sharp shock, or a nightmare, all the built-up energy gets released in one burst, and depending on the power that can be very bad.”

“You mean…?”

“I mean that if Icebro goes dormant and then gets a bad shock he could encase this whole building in ice.  We’d suffocate while we were trying to dig our way out.”

“He’s that strong?”

“He’s gotten stronger as he gets older.  I have theories, but that’s all they are for now.  And they’re not why I’m here, Mr. Stretch.  Do you mind if I call you Cort?”

Cort braced his feet against the floor and turned the chair.  It made a farting noise as it rubbed across the carpet, and Dr. Madison’s face twitched with the effort of hiding a smile.  As the chair turned, Cort suddenly realised that he could see Fizz’s window from his own.

“Call me Cort,” he said.  “Everyone else seems determined to call me Mr. Stretch.”

“Very well Cort, I’m here because of your recent restraint.  You know that you produced a mucus after a chest infection that turned out to be mobile and possibly hostile.  Well, the results are back from the lab, and as the lead physician on this, I’ve conducted a couple of experiments of my own.  Just so you’re aware, we have a sample of your mucus in a sealed glass jar in my laboratory and I expect to keep it there for a while.”

Cort nodded; this sounded like a scientist, though in his experience Dr. Madison should have at least one manic laugh by now.  The Doctor would have done.

“So,” continued Dr. Madison, “we’re confident that this was an isolated incident.  Although your mucus is capable of a bacteria-like reproduction it’s non-sentient on seven out of eight measures and appears, at least in part, to have been produced as a side-effect of medication.  We’ve updated your medical records with specific notes to ensure that we don’t repeat the medication and this incident.  The mucus has some unusual flame-retardant properties that we want to investigate further, and an old colleague of yours, Chip Inside, has offered to help out in his spare time.”

“That’s good of him,” said Cort.  “So I’m in the clear?”

“For the mucus, yes,” said Dr. Madison.  “However, I now need to run some tests to find out if you’ve transferred any of your powers into the mucus.  I think I mentioned earlier that powers can be transferred, and this is one of the ways.  If you’re starting to give up your powers then we need to review our protocols for you.  We may have to restrict your visitors.”

“You mean no-one will be able to see me, don’t you.”  It was a question, it was a flat statement.

“No.”  Dr. Madison held Cort’s gaze without blushing or squirming.  “I mean that we’ll provide you with visitors who we think would benefit from your powers, and only they will be able to visit you until you complete the transfer.”

“Soldiers?”

“Most likely, but the Board makes the decision and there are some board-members who have other interests and priorities.”

“Wait.  Wait a minute.  What happens to me if my powers are all transferred?”

Now Dr. Madison broke eye contact.  He looked down at the ground.

“This is a home for retired superheroes, Cort.  Do I need to spell it out any further?”

Bad Kitty

Bad Kitty came to see him.  He was still strapped down but they’d loosened the neck collar so that he could turn his head a little to watch the television or look at an e-reader on a stand.  A nurse, a new one who looked extremely muscular and was stationed in his room at all times during the day, made her stand in the doorway while she was checked over and checked out.  Cort could just see her face out of the corner of one eye.  She looked furious but resigned, and she didn’t say anything when the nurse went through the pockets of her dressing gown and made her open the backgammon board up.

“Hi Kitty,” he said when she was finally allowed in.  She looked around for a chair, and found that the nurse was sitting back down on the only one.

“I need a chair,” she said to him.  One hand went to her hip, and Cort remembered that pose so well from all the times that they’d fought over the years.  It signalled the onset of hostilities, and he found himself pressing himself back into the mattress in readiness.

“You’ll have to go and get one,” said the nurse, picking up the tv remote control.  Cort didn’t get to choose what they watched.

“No,” said Kitty, and there was a trace of a purr in her voice.  “No, because then you’ll have to search me again on the way back in, and apart from that, I’m too weak to carry a chair.”  Cort had to control a laugh there, as he could remember Bad Kitty throwing actual elephants at him when they’d fought in a circus once.  He managed to catch them all too.

“I can’t leave this room,” said the nurse, his attention back on the television, looking at the program guide.

“Then ring for someone to bring me a chair,” said Bad Kitty.  “Please.”

That was it, thought Cort.  That was the defining moment when you knew you were old.  When you stopped believing that you had the power, or the awe, to make people do things just because it was you, and you started saying ‘please’.  Even though Kitty made it sound a bit vulgar when she said it.  To his slight surprised the nurse pushed the intercom buzzer mounted on the wall by his chair, without stopping browsing through the program guide.

“Can we a chair for the lady?” he said when the intercom buzzed.  “And one of those little trolley tables, they want to play backgammon and if they can’t both see the board they won’t believe there’s no cheating going on.”

“I sometimes wonder,” said Kitty, now looking at Cort, “if I’d have had more success all those years ago if I’d said please more often then.”

“I doubt it,” said Cort.  “I said please all the time, and all that ever happened was that people stopped to think about whether they wanted to do me a favour or not.”

Kitty laughed, a giggle mixed with a purr.  “You never said please to me!”

“I don’t think I said more than three words to you until I met you here.”

“True, most of the time you’d yell Stop and I’d yell Never and then there wasn’t much chance to talk, was there?”

“There was the council meetings, we talked then.”

“But that was politics!”

The chair and table arrived then, brought by two more nurses who looked stronger-than-average, and Kitty graciously said thank-you and sat down, laying the board where Cort could see it.  Cort’s nurse selected a food program from the program guide at last, Masterchef, and sat upright, alert to any movement from Cort, while watching contestants cook a variety of foods.

“Can you stretch your way out of those things?” Kitty indicated the straps and restraints as she finished setting the backgammon board up.  “They don’t look very hard to escape from.”

Cort replied by starting to stretch his arm, thinning it out to pull it out from the strap.  Almost instantly the strap tightened further, pulling his arm painfully into the bed.  He stopped, and the strap stopped binding so tightly.

“That’s clever,” said Kitty.  “I never had that kind of thing!”

“I’m glad,” said Cort, smiling a little.  “You got me tied up a couple of times!”

“How do they do it then?”  She held up the dice pot, and Cort indicated that she would have to roll them for him.  “Do you know?”  The dice clattered on the board, and a 2 and 6 showed uppermost.

“Actually,” he said, “I do.  Build me on the 8-point.”  While Kitty moved the pieces as instructed and them rolled the dice for herself, he explained what Dr. Hernandez had told him.  “There was a fight between the Cut-throat Kid and Norman Nylon that ended up with Nylon breaking his back.  He’s ended up in here as well, but he’s in a near vegetative state, and needs life-support.  But, he’s started produced his signature nylon fibres all the time, and so the staff have hooked him up to this machine, a bit like an old-time Jacquard loom, that reels in the fibres so that he doesn’t end up smothered by them all.  The fibres are semi-sentient, and when Chip Inside heard about it, he came over to take a look at it.  He ended up building them a small AI device that can attach to the fibres and instruct them on how to move.  It’s all very clever, and that’s what’s holding me down now.”

Kitty looked thoughtful.  “Chip’s still alive?”

“Oh yes, but apparently he’s a working research scientist now.  Got a pension and everything.”

“I wish I’d thought about pensions sooner,” said Kitty.  “These places are expensive!”

Cort nodded, though it wasn’t all that visible.  “I feel sorry for Nylon,” he said.  “Sounds like he’s going to be kept alive like that for a long time to come.”

Kitty looked at him oddly, a side-long glance that lingered.  “How about you?” she said.  “What if you’re producing more of that mucus and Chip comes over and weaponises that?”

Cort shuddered, and all the straps tightened momentarily.  The nurse looked up from the tv screen, staring hard at him.

“I really, really hope that doesn’t happen,” he said.

Bodily Functions

Cort opened his eyes again, and found he was looking at the ceiling.  He tried to stretch, but something was holding his wrists and ankles in place.  When he tried to turn his head, he found there was a fixed, heavy collar around his neck.

“Kitty?” he whispered, remembering the four times that he’d been captured by Bad Kitty.  He’d won all of their encounters, but knowing that she was in the same retirement home as him gave him occasional nightmares, and now it seemed as though she might have taken advantage of his failing health.  There was no response from anyone, so he whispered her name again.  This time there was the rustle of paper, and then the clicking of heels on tile.  Approaching heels on tile.

“Mr. Stretch?”  It was his nurse’s voice, calm and motherly.  “Mr. Stretch, try not to move too much.  We’ve strapped you down for your own safety.  Your mucus… well, it seems your mucus has taken on a mind of its own.”

He blinked, and suddenly memories returned.

*

He collapsed in Dr. Hernandez’s office, everything going black, and he heard the alarm start sounding.  Dr. Hernandez must have pressed it, but why?  Then there was a shifting sensation in his chest, almost as though someone had been standing on him and decided to step off at last.  He curled up a little more, and then tiny pinpricks of light appeared in the darkness.  They grew larger and his vision untunnelled.  In front of him he saw Dr. Hernandez looking worried, and backing away.  Something lurched in from the left, something green and jelly-like.  It was shaped like an iceberg and about the size of a medium-sized dog, and clearly shouldn’t be moving around by itself.  Dr Hernandez backed away again, and Cort realised that the green blobby thing was chasing him.

A door banged back, though Cort couldn’t see it, and there was a sharp intake of breath.  Then someone barked orders, short, harsh instructions, and there was the sound of running feet.  Dr. Hernandez hauled himself up onto his desk, crouching there, one hand holding the edge of it for balance.  The green mini-iceberg paused at the desk, and then it started bubbling, translucent green spheres growing out of it like someone blowing into soapy water with a straw.  Dr. Hernandez looked deeply concerned, and was looking around too, hunting for a way to escape.

“Stand back!” shouted someone, and Dr. Hernandez, looking desperate, let go of the edge of the desk and allowed himself to fall backwards.  As soon as he was crashing off the back of the desk there was a crackling sound like the rapid discharge of static and a smell like old ice.  The air hazed, and the green bubbling blobby thing suddenly frosted over and stopped moving.  The last thing Cort saw before his vision faded again was snow falling all around him.

*

“It’s alive?” asked Cort.  His voice was coming back to normal.

“Possibly,” said the nurse.  “Possibly.  It’s been taken away for study now, so you don’t have to worry about it.  You just need to rest and recover.”

“Why am I strapped down?”

The nurse didn’t answer, but walked off instead.  Cort waited for her to come back, unwilling to believe that the nurse who’d been looking after him for the last eighteen months would just abandon him now.  Sure enough, a few minutes (that felt like an hour) later, she returned, with Dr. Hernandez.  He loomed into view, standing deliberately over Cort so that he could see him.

“The problem, Mr. Stretch,” said Dr. Hernandez, his voice sounding restrained and reluctant, “is that we don’t know if you’re going to produce more of this mucus.  That is, was this just a side effect of your illness, or is it a new thing that you’re going to be doing from now on?”

Cort shuddered.  “Are you saying I might be an incubator for that thing?” he asked.

“You saw it?”

“Yes.  A little.”

“We don’t know.”  Dr. Hernandez sighed.  He sounded genuinely upset.  “I really hope not, but… well, you superheroes are an odd bunch.  We’re always learning things about you that just don’t apply to normal people.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cort, meaning it.  The use of the words “normal people” still rankled, but not as much.  The green mucus blob had shaken him, and the idea that he might be producing more of it made him want to curl up in a ball and cry.

“Don’t be,” said Dr. Hernandez.  “You’re all fascinating.  So few of you seem to have expected to get old, or to have any problems when you did.  It’s like you all thought you’d be young forever, fighting amongst each other and having fun without thinking about the rest of us.  And then it all changed and there are no superhero doctors, so you needed us normal people after all.  In a way it’s flattering, and what I’m learning from you all is making me almost as famous.”

“Fighting amongst ourselves?  I always fought the villains.”

“Well, when you all get old there’s not much difference, is there?”  Dr. Hernandez waggled his eyebrows.  “I know all about how you and Bad Kitty used to fight, and now you’re three rooms apart and you both play backgammon on Thursday evenings.”

Cort was silent, thinking that he and Bad Kitty were pretty much level pegging on won backgammon games, but that was exactly where their rivalry, their enmity, had ended up.  Was that sad, somehow?

“How long before you know about the mucus?” he asked at last.

“A couple of days, maybe?” said Dr. Hernandez.  “I’d have you X-rayed, but it wouldn’t help.  You’re so stretchy, so extensible, that I can’t tell when a shadow is cancer, or mucus, or scar tissue from one of your many battles, or even just you being a bit stretched in that place when the X-ray was taken.”

“Do I have to be like this the whole time?

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Stretch,” said Dr. Hernandez.

Welcome to the Glasshouse

Cort coughed, a nasty wet rattle that made people standing nearby back away, covering their own mouths and noses.  The cough lasted nearly a whole minute, at the end of which he was folded over on himself, his head down by his feet and his chest hurting with every spasm.  A warm hand rested on his shoulder, then gently pulled him back upright.

“Now then, Mr. Stretch,” said a voice, “have you remembered to take your medication this morning?”  The nurse at his shoulder was middle-aged and wore her body comfortably.  Her hair was just starting to grey, and a strand of it fell, attractively he thought, across one eye.

“Yes,” he said, shuddering as he heaved a huge breath and got air back into his body.  “Bloody yes, of course I have.”

“There’s no need to swear, Mr. Stretch,” said the nurse, but her voice was still friendly.  She said this all the time to all the residents.  “That cough is sounding worse.  I think you ought to go and see the doctor today.  Get dressed and I–“

“I killed the Doctor!” Cort jolted upright and pulled his dressing-gown tightly around his thin, scarred chest.  “Three times!”

“That’s right,” said the nurse, smiling.  As part of her job she was required to learn all of the significant events of her patients’s history.  She stepped slightly to one side, just in case.  “And the third time, he stayed dead, so it can’t be him I meant, can it Mr. Stretch?”

“Hmmm,” said Cort, unwilling to back down.  His fights with the Doctor had been gruelling, days-long battles that had caused significant architectural damage, and had taken their toll on both of them.  During the first fight the Doctor had managed to destroy the only hospital in a fifty-mile radius, and during the second they’d done enough damage to a nuclear power plant between them that it had had to be immediately decommissioned.  Cort had a sneaking suspicion that the real reason he’d won the third fight was the radiation damage that the Doctor had sustained by Cort leaving his body in a pool of radioactive cooling water.

“So you’ll get dressed,” said the nurse, “and I’ll take you up to see Dr. Hernandez in twenty minutes.  Can you do that for me?”

Cort nodded, his head bobbing and his neck elongating.  The nurse laid one hand back on his shoulder, and gently pushed on his forehead, helping him retract his neck back to a normal length.  Cort said nothing, but he was quietly grateful.

After the nurse left, he pulled the bed-covers back and swung his legs over the edge.  His hips ached abominably as they did every morning when he tried to get up, and he forced himself to stretch his legs out until his feet touched the floor and he could effortlessly stand up.  Then he concentrated, shrinking his legs back down to his normal height, and then further until he was almost just feet, knees and torso.  Finally he stretched back up again, and let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding.  He wiped his eyes, telling himself that the wetness was just the effects of the coughing.

As he dressed, he resisted the temptation to just stretch his arms out across the room, opening the wardrobe and collecting his clothes.  Instead he forced himself to walk over and collect them, just like a normal person.  The word normal left a slightly bitter taste in his mouth; he wasn’t normal, and he hadn’t been for years.  If he’d been normal he’d never have been able to take on the Doctor (three times!) and come away victorious.  He’d never have been able to save eighty-two people from a collapsing skyscraper, or face down Bad Kitty over twenty-eight times, twice in council meetings!

“Are you ready, Mr. Stretch?”  The nurses were always careful to use the ageing superheroes' public names, and never their private ones.  It was a small touch of respect that the superheroes were ridiculously grateful for.  “Dr. Hernandez is expecting you.”  She held out her arm, and Cort took it, hating himself as he rested his feather-weight frame on her, and limped slowly from his room.

The room next to him had the door slightly ajar, and he could see the beautiful Fizz Mission sat up in bed, staring out of the window.  The nurses kept her on Mogadon to try and keep her away from her memories, and there were serious consequences to anyone who tried to talk to her without written permission from the matron.  After that they passed a closed door, which was General Tcho-Tcho’s room; that the door was closed meant he was either sleeping or a dimensional reconfiguration of his body had gone wrong again.  After that was a door on the other side of the corridor that was Bad Kitty’s room, and then they were at the lift.

“I used to be able to just lean out of the window, stretch up to the fifth floor and climb in the window there,” said Cort.  “I hate having to take lifts.”

“There’s always the stairs,” said the nurse, and he fell silent again.

Dr. Hernandez’s office was two doors away from the lift, and he was stood at the door, waiting to take Cort’s arm from the nurse and lead him to the examining couch.  Cort sat down, grateful for the relief from aching joints, and looked at the doctor.

“Nurse tells me that your cough is getting worse,” said Dr. Hernandez.  He was in his fifties, with oiled-back white hair, facial hair modelled on Colonel Sanders, and knotty fingers in huge hands.  “And we will investigate that shortly.  But first, tell me how your memory is?”

Cort sighed, and started talking.  All his visits with Dr. Hernandez were the same, the doctor would check his memories, check his physical condition, and perform a psychological evaluation before he’d address the reported symptoms.  Cort really hoped that if he had a heart-attack it wasn’t Dr. Hernandez who was first on the scene.  Finally Dr. Hernandez pulled out his stethoscope and listened to Cort’s chest, asking him to cough a little.  Cort, who had been trying to control his cough for the whole meeting, gladly let himself start coughing.  To his surprise, he found he couldn’t stop, and then everything went black.  As his vision disappeared, he heard a siren sound, and dimly realised that Dr. Hernandez must have pressed the alarm button in his office.