Chapter 3 - Treatment
Dr. Bryce sat at his desk; his chair swiveled round to face the window, and stared gloomily into the night. He had his glasses clutched in his slim fingers, compulsively twisting them round and round. His mind was going a mile a minute.
He'd just seen a miracle and he was struggling to accept the fact.
The boy had moved so fast he was rendered nearly invisible. That was impossible. He knew the obvious answer and refused point blank to accept it.
There was no Clark Kent!
There was no Superman!
No way, no how, no sir!
Smallville was a TV show starring a former male model named Tom Welling. He'd seen a movie where the guy playing Lex Luthor dressed up like a woman and stayed in a sorority.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Impossible!
Then how the hell did he move so fast?
His lack of answers was souring his mood.
Chad was good kid, and Bryce was fond of him. The hours they spent in session together were enjoyable. The kid was quick, witty and extremely intelligent. He was also gentle and caring, and Bryce knew that wasn't something you found everyday. Even during his episodes, Chad wasn't unpleasant.
Judging by the purported personality of young Clark on the show, Chad fitted the profile perfectly.
Kind, generous, a little dorky, with a massive Messiah complex. Even Chad's accent altered when he was Clark. This was definitely one of his strangest ever cases, and it had just taken a blind left into the Twilight Zone.
A knock at the door interrupted his muddling. He swiveled back round.
"Come in!" he called.
Helen, his aide, stepped inside carrying a thick arch-lever folder. She scuttled over to the desk and laid it down in front of her boss.
"Dr. Hamilton sent over all his reports," she said, "Will that be all, James?"
He gave her a gentle smile, and nodded.
"Yes, thank you Helen. You can go home, I'll be here for a while yet."
"Can I get you anything before I go? Coffee? Tea?"
"Mulder and Scully's phone number..." muttered Bryce.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing," he said, "Thanks Helen, I'll be fine."
She nodded, then turned and left the office. After the door shut behind her, he turned his attention to the folder.
Dr. Steven Hamilton of Denver Medical had been none too happy when Bryce had called him requesting Chad's medical records from the accident. It had taken a great deal of sweet talking and subtle threats to get the good doctor to relent.
Bryce remembered Hamilton's parting words at the end of their phone call.
"I don't know what you think you're looking for, James, but be prepared. You're going to see things in this kid's file that you can't explain, and neither can I."
Ominous words in the circumstances.
Bryce propped himself up in his chair, opened to the first page, and started reading.
-----
Four hours later he hadn't moved from his chair.
His desk was now scattered with a mess of scribbled notations and post-it-notes. He'd been through the file itself ten times over already. He was confident he could recite its complicated medical jargon without effort.
And still, he could not believe it.
Chad Karlysle, for all intents and purposes, should be dead as a doornail.
When Denver's Medic Team rushed him into the ER the night of the accident, he was a mess of shattered bones and ripped tendons. According to the report of his girlfriend, Chad's instincts had made him lean his body over hers to shield her from the impact. It had worked. But the result was that Chad himself had exposed his entire body to the crash zone.
His face was severely lacerated from where he smashed the windshield with his head. Many internal organs were ruptured, and he'd lost gallons of blood by the time Emergency Services got on the scene. The doctor on call had almost named him DOA.
Yet, barely a month later, Chad's health was fully restored. It was a medical miracle unheard of. But his doctor, Hamilton, took none of the credit.
The last slip of information in the file was a memo Hamilton had written after receiving the results of Chad's DNA Diagnostics on the day he was released.
The picture it painted was out of this world.
"Chad Karlysle is a phenomenon.His rapid recovery after a horrifying accident prompted me to reorder a scan on his DNA blood work, and the results I've received have left me baffled.
Chad's DNA has completely mutated on a sub-atomic level. His cellular make-up no longer appears to be protein-based, but is replicating itself on a source our researchers cannot identify.
What's more, his atomic make-up is no longer stable. Or rather, it should not be stable in a human being.
The atoms themselves appear to be contracting and squeezing together at a critical mass that should have seen his body implode a long time ago.
The atoms now boast a density of 3 trillion tons per cubic inch. That, in my 'medical' opinion, is quite impossible.
The only other phenomena to exhibit such atomic density are neutron stars, found in the distant reaches of our universe. The atoms that make up these 'super-stars' are so dense they are basically one big atom.
That's what Chad Karlysle's physiology is displaying. And I, for one, am at a loss to explain it.
The tangible implications of this means that we can no longer do any new blood tests, because Chad's skin appears to have become impregnable. Fitting a needle is impossible, because the needles themselves snap.
If there is an explaination for this radical mutation, a scientific rather than theological one, then it appears to be beyond me."
Bryce laid the sheet of paper back down and clasped the bridge of his nose.
God! He was getting a headache.
.
.
.