In a few short weeks, the entire city had turned on him. It wasn't surprising, considering what happened in the park. People screamed at him on the streets, calling him names. Some people outright attacked him or threw rocks. But most were still too terrified of him to come near him. They insulted him from a distance. They were calling him a terrorist, the "Demon of Empire City."

Even Trish had turned on him. Once that idiot on the TV had revealed that Cole had been at the center of the explosion, everyone had blamed him for it. Everyone had believed that he was a killer, that he was guilty, even Trish. Trish's rejection of him hurt more that he could have imagined. He dealt with it the best way he knew how, keeping himself as busy as possible. But the anger and sadness crept back into his mind as soon as the action abated.

Cole had taken refuge on a rooftop. The wind whipped around the billboard he had hidden himself behind. It was blissfully peaceful on the roof, with nobody shouting obscenities at him at random. Cole tried to push his emotions away so he could sleep. A crumpled potato chip bag was crushed in his fist. He'd been very lucky to find that. He was just closing his eyes when the wind changed, pulling at him, tugging on his limbs.

"Why are you so sad, Cole?" a voice whispered in his ear.

Cole nearly jumped out of his skin. He jerked his head from side to side, but nobody was around, and his enhanced electrical abilities didn't sense anybody nearby. He'd had another voice in his head before. But this voice wasn't inside his head. It was as if someone was sitting next to him, talking to him. But there was nobody... who'd want to be his friend now anyway, now that he was a terrorist? He wrapped his arms around his chest, warming himself.

"Go away," Cole muttered. "I don't know if I'm dreaming or what, but I don't wanna talk right now."

"Tell me what's wrong," the voice said softly. Cole determined it was a female voice. He sighed to himself, figuring that he'd finally lost his marbles. And if he had lost his marbles, what did it matter if he answered the voice? The wind howled even louder and Cole started to shiver.

"My girlfriend hates me," he mumbled under his breath. "This whole city hates me." He put his head down on his arms. A few weeks ago he'd been sleeping next to Trish in a warm bed in their apartment. Now he was a freak of nature, huddled behind a billboard outside trying to keep warm, and talking to himself. Just great.

"I don't hate you," the voice told him sympathetically. The wind died down, and Cole stopped shivering.

"Yeah and that's wonderful and all, but I'm still an outcast and alone," Cole said bitterly. "And I've finally gone crazy," he added.

"Crazy?" the voice asked.

"I'm talking to a disembodied voice," Cole clarified exasperatedly.

"Oh, right, sorry," the voice said quietly in his ear. The man brought his hand up to the side of his head. It was as if someone had literally whispered right in his ear...

"Am I crazy?" he whispered, mostly to himself. He didn't feel like he was talking to himself... there was definitely sound hitting his eardrums.

"I dunno, are you?" the voice said with a sarcastic edge. "Maybe you are! Or maybe this is all a dream!"

Cole pushed back his sleeve and pinched his arm. This was no dream. If it were, there would probably be more dead people.

"This isn't a dream," he declared, looking up to watch clouds floating across the moon. "So I must be insane. Where's the nearest pharmacy?"

"Oh you're fine, you don't need drugs," the voice said.

"So you're saying you're real? And I just can't see you for whatever reason?"

"I guess so."

"Then where are you?"

"Over here," the voice said, the words drifting by, possibly from any direction, it was impossible to tell.

"That doesn't help," Cole muttered peevishly.

"Sorry."

"I need to sleep," Cole said, trying to get back to reality. "So, goodnight stress-induced delusion or whatever you are..."

"I'm your friend," the voice said faintly.

"Friend, right," Cole muttered under his breath.

"Right," the voice agreed pleasantly.

The voice went silent. Though it had gone, Cole still didn't want to sleep. What if tonight was the night the voices of the dying crept back into his head? It seemed likely, considering he had just started hearing voices while awake too. Although Cole did he best to fight off sleep, sleep eventually caught up with him...

In his dream, Cole is riding his bike down Broad Street. It was just another normal day of work delivering packages as a bike courier. He sees his destination: a massive office building twenty stories high in the middle of the historic section of town. The building seems even larger in his dream, cleaner and shinier as if it were newly built. The sun is hitting the glass windows at just the right angle so that the light is glaring. He is so distracted by this that he clips a young woman attempting to cross the road. The woman shrieks and stumbles, landing roughly on the curb. Cole screeches to a halt.

"Shit, I am so sorry!" Cole shouts over the roar of traffic, dropping his bike and leaning over the woman. "You okay?"

The woman looks up at him from her sitting position on the curb. The first thing Cole notices is that she has the biggest, bluest eyes he has ever seen. Aside from that, she has long, blonde hair and a slender figure, dressed in a woman's business suit, complete with jacket, pencil skirt, and high heels. She gives him a wry smile and holds out her hand.

"Help me up?" she says.

"Yeah," Cole responds, pulling the young woman gently to her feet.

"Thanks," she says, dusting off her skirt and picking up her small purse.

"I'm sorry I hit you, wasn't paying attention I guess," Cole says picking up his bike again. The woman laughed.

"You think?" she replies, rolling her eyes. Cole grinned, relieved she wasn't going to report him or anything.

"I'm Cole," he says, possessed by a weird desire to know this woman and holding out his hand to her. She smiled and placed her small hand in his.

"I'm..." she beings, but then she stops, looking up at the sky. Cole frowns and glances upward as well. The sky was turning black in the middle of the day. Fear mounting in his chest, Cole looks back down at the girl whose hand he is still holding. His breath catches in his throat. The girl is dead. There is a huge hole ripped in her stomach. Intestines and stringy blood vessels and nerves were hanging out of her belly in a tangled mess.

The girl blinks her blue, dead eyes at him.

"I'm dead," she says dispassionately, and Cole feels her hand slipping away from his.

"But who are you?" Cole gasps as the darkness descends on them. He keeps trying to cling to her hand but she continues to slip away. Fires spring up in the street. Screams echo all around. The girl blinks at him again and she begins to fade.

"You're dead, too," she responds, pointing at his abdomen. He looks down at himself. His body has been torn to shreds and blood is streaming down his arms and legs in a waterfall of crimson gore. The woman disappears and Cole is alone and dead. He turns in a circle, looking for her, but sees only desolation and destruction everywhere he looks. The dead begin to surround him...

Cole woke up in a cold sweat, nearly falling off of his perch behind the billboard. The dream was already slipping away. He tried to hang onto it, it seemed like something important, something he should remember. As he got up and stretched, hoping to shake off his lingering fear, the last thing he thought was that he wished he'd found out that girl's name. He could barely recall what she had looked like, just the eyes. He felt certain those large blue eyes were going to haunt him until this was over.

The woman he'd just dreamed about was the girl he saw die right after the explosion. He was sure of it. But how he was going to find out who she was still evaded him. Cole wasn't even sure why he cared so much. She was dead, wasn't she? What would he even do if he found out who she had been? Still, it bothered him more than he thought it would. He had seen and heard dozens of people die that day... why was she so special?

/

Cole was on the verge of abandoning all reason and giving in to sheer panic.

A gang had attacked him. The gang that people were calling the reapers. Men dressed in red coats with the hoods drawn up. Some of them had puked black goo as they surrounded him. Cole really didn't get what was up with that. Were they all on some new drug? Maybe they all had food poisoning. Then he saw them all pull machine guns from under their coats and his pulse shot through the roof.

Pure survival instinct kept him alive. He dove sideways behind a dumpster as a rain of bullets descended on him. Fear coursed through his veins, feeding his power. He glanced out from behind the dumpster and set bolts of lightning flying from his hands, sending two gang members to the ground, convulsing.

A hand grabbed him from behind. Cole thrashed frantically, trying to shake off the unwanted grip. His stomach clenched with fear again, and electricity coursed through his skin. The hand unexpectedly let go and Cole yanked his arm free. He turned and there was a body slumped against the brick wall. Smoke was rising from the body's hand. Cole clamped his hands over his abdomen, emptying his stomach of what little food was in it when he saw that the skin on the victim's arm was charred and black and oozing.

Cole didn't know what he'd done to deserve this kind of punishment. He didn't want to be a freak of nature who reduced human bodies to a blackened pile of smoking flesh. He didn't want to be a killer. How many lives had he ended now? He'd lost count.

Still retching, Cole stood up. The rest of the gang had fled. But in their place was a tall man in a long white coat.

"Weak stomach, Cole?" the white coated man asked.

"What?" Cole choked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Your powers... do they frighten you?" the man said, his dark eyes fixed on Cole. "Does what you can do scare you?"

"No," Cole said boldly, trying to keep his knees from knocking together. "Those freaks got what was coming to them."

"Them?" the man said with a short bark like laugh. He spared a brief glance at the red coated bodies. "Never mind about them. They are the poisoned ones. Their bodies couldn't handle the side effects of your creation."

"Huh?" Cole said stupidly.

"They will die," the older man said slowly, as if Cole were deaf. "They are already dying. I imagine they'd quite love to get their hands on you, though."

"Who the hell are you anyway?" Cole asked roughly, his mind catching up with the present. The man's hollow eyes bored into him. As Cole watched, his left hand twitched, revealing a limb that was entirely encased in metal.

"You mean you haven't guessed? I am your creator, of course," the man said with a little bow. "Lord Kessler, at your service. I am here to check on your progress."

"My progress?" Cole said, fury building inside him. "You did this to me? You made me into this?" he said, electricity tracing its way through his fingers.

"Indeed," the man said, his white coat whipping around in the wind. Cole wanted to scream, so many questions were twisting around in his head.

"Why!?" he spat, his hands balled into fists. He could feel his control over his powers slipping as he got angrier, and sharp, bright blue bolts escaped from his hands, grounding themselves in the pavement. The man's forehead wrinkled as he watched.

"Interesting," the white coated man said, his eyes fixed on Cole's fists.

Cole didn't want to know what was interesting, he just wanted answers. Fury overtaking reason, he charged forward, intending to scare this white coated man into telling him everything he wanted to know.

Faster than the eye could follow, the older man had his metal hand around Cole's throat. Cole's eyes widened in surprise as he struggled to breath. His strength was unreal.

"Care to see your future?" the man asked, raising his flesh and blood hand to touch his index finger to Cole's forehead. As soon his finger made contact, Cole's world went blank, only to be filled with images. Horrifying images. He saw death and destruction on a far greater scale that what had happened in the historic section of town. Cole wished he could close his eyes, but this was all in his mind. The entirety of Empire City had been annihilated, and its population completely wiped out. A single blood-soaked figure stood atop a pile of corpses, and Cole knew that he would be the architect of this destruction. All this death would be his fault.

With a jolt to his senses, Cole found himself lying flat on his back on the asphalt. He flipped over and began crawling away from Kessler, who was watching him as if he were a bug he'd like to step on.

"You saw," Kessler said. It wasn't a question, it was a statement. "That is your future. Why do you fight it?"

"You don't know me," Cole choked out of his bruised throat.

"I know that is what you were made to do," Kessler said, a note of sick curiosity in his voice now, like he was wondering if Cole would make a squishing sound or a crunching sound if he stepped on him. "You are a weapon. You are the embodiment of power."

"I can change the future. I won't be that," Cole rasped, attempting to summon his powers.

"Hmm," Kessler said thoughtfully, not looking at all worried about Cole's power. "Maybe you just need time to think."

The madman waved his metal hand, and Cole's mind went blank once again.

When Cole's mind settled back into his body, the first thing he felt was a cool breeze on his cheek. His eyes opened slowly, but it felt like they were full of gunk. Still on his back, he flopped his arm limply onto his face and rubbed away the goop. When he could finally see again, he had to blink his eyes a few more times to be sure of what he was seeing.

He had to be dreaming. Or maybe he was dead, finally.

There was what looked like a transparent angel hovering over him, her face a mere foot from his face. He could see her long, elegant feathery wings stretched out behind her. The angel's hair floated around her face as she stared into his eyes. She was unbelievably beautiful.

When she saw that he was awake, her face broke into a glorious, bright smile. She blinked her wide eyes at him, and said...

"What's up?"

The illusion was broken. Cole blinked and the angel was gone. His mind still in shock, he sat up, wondering if this was his future. To be alone, plagued with crazy visions and scary dreams, neither of which made any sense. Oh, and uncontrollable electricity based super powers that scare the shit out of people. What an awesome future this was going to be.

He suddenly had no problem with the idea that he was supposed to change the future. Wherever this future was headed, he wanted no part of it. He had to do something about it. What on earth that was going to be, he had no idea.

Well I'm off to a great start.