STARSCAPE BOOKS(18)
“Easy there,” the nurse said, smiling at him as she held out his medicine.
Lucky gulped down the pills, not even bothering with water, then fell back on the bed as the wonderful numbness flowed through his mind, smothering all of the voices. They were still there, but they didn’t seem to matter.
“Lucky,” they whispered, calling him by a nickname that was pathetically inaccurate. He’d never had any real luck, except for meeting the guys. Thanks to them, a normal life had seemed possible after he’d left Edgeview. As he drifted into the comfort of nothingness, he saw the moment when it had all come apart.
At first, school hadn’t been bad. He did okay in his classes and even made a couple friends. He thought he’d escaped his past. Until early last February, when they’d moved to the new building. That’s when it all went horribly wrong.
As the door to his room closed, he heard the nurse say, “Doctor, I think we’ve made a breakthrough. He talked to me. He actually made sense.”
“That’s encouraging. What did he say?”
“He wants to go to Philadelphia.”
cheater discovers that
poker is a contact sport
THE FIRST PUNCH knocked Cheater to the floor. Flashes of pain mixed in his mind with flashes of panic and scattered fragments of the laws of motion. Good old Newtonian physics. Equal and opposite reactions. A body at rest. His face had been at rest, and resisted the impulse to move, but the force of the fist had overcome inertia. His brain, inside his skull, had also been reluctant to move, even after his skull had shifted its spatial location. His brain had no choice but to follow. Do thoughts have inertia? he wondered.
A kick caught him in the middle of his back, right under the shoulder blades. More laws burst into his mind—force equals mass times acceleration. A heavy boot has more mass than a shoe. A fast jab has more acceleration than a looping hook. A whole lot of force was coming his way.
Cheater curled into a ball and tried to protect himself. A sphere had the least surface area of any geometric solid. But any surface at all was far too much right now. Thoughts rained on him, too, along with the punches and kicks. They hated him for a thousand reasons. He was smart, he talked too much, he looked different, and he was cleaning them out at a game they thought they were good at. They even hated him because he was short.
Something stomped down hard on his side. He let out a whimper, but clamped his teeth together. He knew anything he said would just provide more fuel for their rage.
After the next kick rocked his head, the sharp pains faded, replaced by numbness. He heard a conversation from far away.
“Oh great, I think you killed him.”
“No way. He’s still breathing. We’d better get out of here.”
“What if he tells on us?”
“You’re right. Maybe we should make sure he can’t talk.”
“Why bother? It would be his word against ours. Nobody would believe him. We can say we were at a movie or something. Let’s just get out of here.”
Cheater waited, not really caring what they did next. Though he was curious what they would decide. It was an interesting ethical problem. Commit a greater crime to eliminate the risk of being accused of a lesser crime? Maybe he could solve it using a game-theory matrix. First, he’d have to quantify the parameters …
He was still thinking about situational ethics when he passed out.
flinch kills his audience
“THANK YOU. IT’S good to be here.” Flinch scanned the crowd, wondering who’d be the first to take a shot at him. Probably someone at the table in the second row that was filled with college kids. I’ll find out soon enough.
This was his first time at The Laughing Gherkin—one of dozens of comedy clubs in the area that filled their evenings with local acts. The clubs were all the same—small spaces jammed with tiny tables charging large prices for miniature beverages.
He took a deep breath and launched into his routine. Before he could get two words out, a guy in the rear shouted, “Why don’t you come back when you’re old enough to shave?”
The instant the last word cleared the heckler’s mouth, Flinch shot back at him with, “I’m old enough to shave right now.” He jammed his hand in his pocket, gave the guy an exaggerated glare, and added, “Come on up and I’ll shave a bunch of years off your life.”
The crowd loved it. Flinch knew it wasn’t the best comeback in the world. Even as he spoke, several better ones popped into his mind. Yeah, I don’t need to shave, but you really need to bathe. Why don’t you go home until they find a cure for ugly? But it didn’t matter if the line wasn’t the best. Not when it was the fastest. His mind was already fast. He could almost always come up with a good line to cut down a heckler. His brain was wired for comedy. That was his gift. His true talent. But his other talent—his supernatural one—gave him an edge no other comedian had. He really was faster than lightning.