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19: Fact or Fiction
Lincoln Loud shuts the van door, his eyes favoring his skate shoes (which is something he never did — he could clearly remember buying those shoes not because they were good for skateboarding, but because he thought the design was cool), his breath trapped in his palpitating chest. He rubs his arms, trying to break the guilty gooseflesh running frantically down him. The ass-whoopin' has been finalized, as most say: he would now be forced under the imposition of Dad's leathery vengeance, brandished with his absolute snake of a belt.
He is certain. Sitting next to him is his father, his eyes brought down into rageful slits, his teeth grinding . . .
But no, that is not what it appears to be. His father looks at him, not necessarily with rage, but with an odd mixture of confusion and disappointment. A kind of concern, inciting what feels to be a piercing chill beneath his ribcage. The goosebumps have refused to leave too, a feeling which has not accompanied this, one could say, cold-heartedness yet. Why he would be concerned, Lincoln doesn't know. Right about now, anybody with a palm's worth of sense would be willing to beat Lincoln down six feet under. His head begins to tense, not with a headache, nor with thought. It tenses for no good reason, as if it is under some kind of unseen pressure.
His father's voice matches that typical fatherly reproach where the tone hikes up as he speaks. "Lincoln . . ."
"I know," Lincoln utters. "I don't know why."
"Oh goodness bud, give me more words than that," Lynn says. "Maybe I can understand what's going on if you give me more than a few square feet to build on."
Lincoln winds the seatbelt around his sunken belly and clips the T-shaped end into the buckle. His face has gone pasty, he can see it on the tip of his nose. He has somewhat adjusted to his sensing of what he thinks to be worry, and is better able to manage it. Before, he might've felt like he might drop dead from a heart-attack. Now, he's able to talk without images of him suddenly dying running through the foreground of his mind. His hand touches his chest, feeling into his jacket. It is a great deal better than feeling as if a portion of hell was stuck there.
"I'm just confused," Lincoln says. "I just felt different all of the sudden."
His tongue scrabbles around in his mouth, searching a spot to settle. He pastes a hand to his head. It nearly slips off; his forehead has been exuding sweat, running across its length in an oily sheen. And now he feels different, a new kind of sense of emotion. Something slithers beneath his skin, something indescribably weird and strange. Something stirs, makes him shudder, and his skin stiffens. Gooseflesh, sharp and rigid, pepper him in caviar-sized speckles.
"I'm worried Lincoln," he says. His tone is palpable; almost as if a reaching hand. "This is not like you."
The drive home is unbearably slow. Lincoln tries to keep his eyes pointed out of the window, watching pedestrians walking along the lengths of Royal Wood's busy sidewalks. There are no students of his age or even close, not until school lets out. But in this he only finds comfort, as this fact has only smothered the fear of being recognized by someone at school; despite him being in a car barreling through smooth spring air at fifty-five kilometers an hour, despite him being a social outlier (to be fair, his white hat of hair is pretty distinct).
A group of young men and women, college-aged perhaps or maybe a bit older, have crowded around a bus stop. A poster is fixed onto a post at the curb, a man grinning with his thumb erect, bald plate glistening, the background a bright and amiable riot of color. Beneath it, printed in thick, bolded letters: UNSURE OF WHO YOU ARE? JOIN THE ROYAL WOODS COMMUNITY HOUSE TODAY! Social groups, recreation, volunteer work, and sheltering.
Lincoln keeps himself in deep thought for the rest of the car-ride, despite his face being seemingly flamed from the tension, guilty gooseflesh running down him. He tries to stow these feelings away, confused by what it is, still eager to learn. In a way, he feels as if he is part of a mystery, and he has the perfect chance to bind the scattered pieces into one big picture. But these strange things happening to him . . . it almost makes him sick to his stomach. A return of normalcy doesn't seem so bad itself; but he begins to consider giving these newfound abilities a chance before doing anything to get them out.
At home, he enters the house, his heart pounding incredibly hard. His father guides him back to the couch, the very same spot in which he sat that morning, where had taken the poor (in other words, not criticizing at all) tongue-lashing from his parents. But a voice, faint and slipping through from the back of his mind, reminds him: you ought to prepare yourself more this time. He swallows, thick saliva gliding down the walls of his throat. His heart, still pounding, beats warmly against the inside of his temples. A headache.
It may have been because he sensed a swinging mixture of emotions from his parents, but why Lincoln would feel so many strange things at once then; he hadn't known. The soft jelly of his eyes are glazed with something painful; burning and searing. The goosebumps are even stronger now, feeling as if they might be due to some tiny creature trying to escape, the feeble attempts at escape of a buried bug. His mother comes and sits next to him, same spot as this morning, and he feels weightless. His stomach hikes up to his throat, his legs turn to putty . . . his penis feels non-existent. This is the feeling you might get on a roller coaster. He thinks: They call it zero-gravity. Positive G's.
Lincoln shifts in the chair, feeling overwhelmed. A snarl of his white hair feathers into his face and he rakes it away. This weightless feeling, like a dagger in his guts, makes him feel nauseous. Any more and he might throw up. He can feel his stomach bubbling up with acid, sloshing as a wet mop might. Jesus Christ, he thinks, not again.
By the end of his talk with his parents, he is surprised; this one is still relatively light-hearted, concerning more the motive behind his actions over the actions themselves. You need to learn to keep this under control, his mother said. Her eyes were tightened, two glowing slits. A glow of dreadful accusation. This can't happen again. Me and your father need to be sure of it. And we've spoken about it. It was then that she had looked at his father, nodding with some kind of reluctance, before turning back to him. We've decided you owe us. For the bathroom, with your own money. We want you to get a job and figure this out; on your own.
Questions are welcomed though.
Questions.
Lincoln scoffs about that . . . questions. He has too many questions, too many to think about. Why is this happening to him? Where in the ever-living-fuck have all these strange notions materialized from? A spider; could this have come from a goddamn spider? He remembers now; the keyboard on his laptop, stripped of its keys. Found their spot on his finger and decided to make it home. And more questions now; his fingers, why are they so sticky? His ridiculously swelled reflexes? In all honesty, what is there to say? His movements out there on the cafeteria floors were more jacked up than those of a man full of happy dust.
He climbs the stairs without hurry. Questions are welcomed, he thinks. Maybe it's about time I get searching, then.
Now his pace quickens, elbows pumping furiously as if the pistons of an engine. He enters his room, closing the door behind him, but this time moving with great precision. He has already broken a lot of things today. The shaft of his door doesn't need to be added to the list. He pulls out the fold-out chair, props it up, and sits down. Then he opens up his laptop and remembers his keyboard is damned.
"Right," he says. He eyes the jumble of typewriter keys to the left of the wooden highboy. "Shoulda seen that."
For a moment, he stalls, his tongue squelching thickly in his mouth. Then he produces his phone out of his pocket, ready — completely eager — to continue searching.
That choking stress which tirelessly dogged him earlier is gone. He searches, heart no longer a beating drum in his chest, stomach no longer a bubbling pot of oil with a threaded piece of ice dangling over the top. He searches, completely alive, ready to see what would come next, the answer he would get. His fingers work on the phone's digital keyboard: Genetics Laboratory of Detroit Spider. A quick buffer on the screen, then everything comes up. He finds what he needs to know.
These new 'senses' he has, are just exactly in alignment with that of the enhanced spider. Greater tenacity, a sense of impending danger, an ability to detect its enemies intentions — which Lincoln imagines to be this feeling of emotion he's been sensing — increased durability and strength, and most importantly . . . it's big and fat and ugly. Just like Lincoln.
He laughs and does one last courtesy search, hoping to rule out any questions: How similar is the DNA of a human to the DNA of an insect? Could this justify the transfer of DNA? Maybe. Or maybe not. He does remember one scientist, going by the name of Mr Bautista, preaching about how sixty percent of the DNA in a fruit flies matches with that of a human, but that is irrelevant. Fruit flies don't equate to spiders; no-way-Jose.
He does find what he needs to find this time, however. But that doesn't matter; because there's a flash of light, then the nostalgic look of a memory . . . the big screen, which he had been reading when he was bitten by that spider. Pain shoots through his hand, hot and sizzling, but he ignores it. Is enhanced memories part of the abilities? He does not know and frankly he does not care; the only thing he can care about right now, is figuring out where this damned set of powers came from once and for all, settling it for good.
The memory swims up into vision, and Lincoln realizes that Herman Industries had used the very same genetic code to alter the spider that they had used to alter the human body. And now, he feels stress alleviate in a whisper. He feels thousands of unanswered questions floating off, fading off for good; assumingly never to come back again.
"So, it is true, this is from the spider. The spider at the GLOD," Lincoln says. He utters a line of wavering laughter (a kind that, if done in public, would turn everyone's head), creasing his face in a wide grin; a grin induced by a huge wave of exaltation, turning him over just as it had done this morning when he was with Lynn. "It's true, it's true, it's true!"
He jumps down on his bed, still laughing, body loose in an X. He jostles himself around, burritos himself in his duvet, then finally bellies it out and lets it sit on top of him in a blue mat. The relief is a bit much, and he feels himself going off into some kind of—
Lincoln sits up in bed. Surprisingly, he had slept. It is dark outside; the bleak darkness out which his circle window is staring into has made the revelation to him. He looks ahead dumbly, regarding nothing but a blank wall, nothing but the foot of his bed frame. His legs are still splayed in a V, stinking as all hell beneath the hint of English Leather he had sprayed all over himself that morning, his sleep-inspired erection making a considerable tent in the covers. Speaking of penis, it feels as if it is on fire. A fat piss would do.
And suddenly he is climbing out of the circular window at the back end of his room, smiling broadly, eyes wide with intense excitement. He realizes it has been raining; somehow he did not notice, perhaps out of the blindness of his sleep, or maybe because he is just an idiot. Either of these assumptions would do. Rain courses down his face, dappling his white hair. He lets go and falls into a strip of grass by the driveway, landing with a dull thud of earth.
He starts running, panting as if a dog, feeling, for the first time in so long, in control; in power. His speed never fails to increase. Just when Lincoln thinks he has reached his limit, he goes faster. Faster, faster, faster, faster, faster! What is he running at now? Doing sixty— seventy miles an hour? Wind drives into his face, sending forward rain like a flock of flying needles. His hair would have danced crazily if it weren't for the fact that it had now been plastered to his skull cap in a soft gleam. He keeps running however, and before he knows it, he is at Royal Woods High, breath coming out of his mouth in sharp bounces of misty air.
He slides his curved hands down his pants, somewhat tired. But this feeling doesn't last; it should have coated his mouth in the taste of blood, sharp and metallic, with spit thicker than mucus, but that did not happen. He sucks a single breath into his lungs and feels whole again. He turns back, thinking of where he is. The back of the school, he thinks.
In an environment so ominous, Lincoln could have never thought he would be so chock-full of eagerness and excitement. Fog lurks through the open air in translucent-gray ribbons, the pavement shiny and sparkling. Falling rain hisses in the April cool, small pellets of rain flying up with each drop. A dumpster sits to his left, emitting a smell that is dank and kind of shitty, but he does not draw back. Instead, he looks at his hand, curiosity brimming.
He thinks, only briefly: Would this work?
And it does; he puts one hand to the partially-slatted wall of bricks, and it sticks. Then he puts the other hand down on it as well, a bit higher this time, and it sticks as well. (Oh man oh man where is the machete it has got to be somewhere here in this jungle where is it where is it) He pushes his foot against the wall now, bringing himself upward, creasing his sodden socks. The hand he has placed on the wall comes off with a peeling sound, and he sticks it back on the wall again, this time higher.
He climbs the wall, grin widening. There is no breath in him to speak, at least any that he can muster to do so. Breath is only rushing in and out, fevered in the exhilaration of discovering everything that he could do, everything these powers had given him. He keeps gaining altitude, looking back, seeing the trees lessen in size, seeing the neighborhoods ahead, seeing the pepper of stars through the sky. The moon hangs in the night like a spreading pool of white.
Sucking in a great gulp of breath, Lincoln pushes himself off the wall (maybe what, thirty or forty feet in the air) and jumps, soaring through the sky. Though that is only short-lived; instead of flying like Superman, he glides for a few seconds before falling to the ground in a spill. Branches heavy with leaves spring into his face. He makes contact with watered dirt. Mud cakes his clothes. But he only laughs it off, not caring.
He gets up, walking forward. A railway is here, rolling out through a cleared-out strip of the forest. Gravel paves the undersides of the rusted tracks, wooden planks conjoining them as if a ladder. Weeds struggle through tiny wedges and space here and there, some growing as tall as a shoe, some blossoming in yellow dandelions or cotton-like spheres of seed. Lincoln thinks: This is the Amtrak. Runs through Royal Woods and heads somewhere to another state.
A concrete wall (heavily graffitied), about fifteen feet high, backs the train tracks, cutting out the slope of a hill on which more trees stand. The tracks feed into two parallel tunnels, one side emerging out of its thick darkness, the other diving into that darkness.
Just one more burst of energy. Lincoln Loud runs forward — his legs electric, his chest heaving, his feet smashing into thick mud — and leaps over the concrete wall, landing on the grassy hill above. At last, he has found his breath. And he decides to scream for joy, his sleep-soured breath driving forward in a heavy train of mist.