Ex-Heroes, Peter Clines [reading like a writer txt] 📗

to it. Finding a Beverly Hills–adjacent place we both liked. Buying furniture. Teaching her how to drive stick. Rescuing a pair of stray kittens we named Lewis and Clarke. Proposing to her while we were getting lawn-bowling lessons.

And then there was the oddness of me developing superpowers.

Meredith helped with that, too. She was there for every part of it, keeping me sane. That first time, straining noodles, we both thought it was just dumb luck the boiling water didn’t leave me with red skin and blisters. Then there was the broken glass we thought slashed my hand, but there wasn’t even a hint except for the cut in my shirt cuff.

Of course, the one we couldn’t ignore was the kid with the green bandanna stabbing me in the gut. I know now he was a Seventeen. Then I just knew he was the punk who made Meredith scream by trying to kill me.

We’d just seen Eddie Izzard at the Wiltern and were walking to where we parked, a few blocks up Oxford. She never liked parking in structures and called it a scam. The kid grabbed her arm, shouted for my wallet, and then he twisted her arm and she screamed. I lunged and pounded him until he was unconscious, and that’s when we realized he’d stabbed me six times during our fight. Six bloody holes in my shirt, but not a mark on me.

When we saw the news reports about the Mighty Dragon, Blockbuster, Zzzap, and the rest, we both knew what I had to do. Meredith bought a full-body motorcycle suit and stitched on a logo, and for months I was the Immortal, the man who couldn’t be killed. I was hit by cars and shotgun blasts. Threw myself off buildings. One night after a gang shoot-out I got home and pulled twenty-three bullets out of myself.

And then we made another discovery.

Mere cut herself with a kitchen knife while chopping broccoli. Nothing deadly, maybe a stitch or two. We laughed—it was bound to happen someday, she was so clumsy. And I held her finger and felt a tingle, a flow of my power, and she gasped as it closed up. The skin sealed together without so much as a pucker.

A medical resident who could heal with a touch. My success rate at the hospital went up. My popularity with my fellow heroes and police did, too. It took another month for my codename to change to Regenerator.

I teamed up with most of the heroes at one point or another. Midknight. The Mighty Dragon. Cairax. Even the police during a few standoffs. I was the ultimate support guy. With me backing you up, nobody could fail. Heck, with me there everyone was an immortal.

And then, with all this going on, then she died.

It was stupid. A stupid way to die. She’d been safe. So safe. It wasn’t fair. That’s what’s important to remember. It wasn’t fair for her to get taken away from me like that. That’s what they’ll need to understand. What happened wasn’t right, so I didn’t do anything wrong.

A broken finger. She died because of a broken finger. Mashed in a car door, broke the skin, heavy bleeding. If I hadn’t been out playing hero I could’ve fixed it in ten seconds. Instead the neighbors called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital.

And once she got there, the emergency room staff screwed up a test and gave her the wrong type of blood. She was Anegative and some idiot nurse misread a chart and gave her Rh positive blood. Blood that should’ve been screened out of their blood banks to start with, because it was tainted with hep-B. The mixed symptoms confused them and they spent hours pumping her full of poisons to deal with misdiagnoses, and filling her with more of the wrong blood. The odds of it happening are a million to one. I know this. Two horrible, freak mistakes that both fell on one person. As someone in the medical profession, I know this and I understand why they could’ve been so baffled. Hell, anyone who watches House knows why they were baffled.

It still wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

Meredith died in agony just as I got home and the neighbors were telling me she’d gone to the hospital for something minor. And so I did what anyone else would. What anybody with my abilities would’ve done.

It didn’t take long to claim her body. The hospital staff knew how bad they’d screwed up and were willing to agree to anything. I talked about religious beliefs and they let me walk out the door with her body. I kept my hands on her the whole time, willing life into her nerves, every fiber, each individual cell.

My power let me see what had gone wrong. Let me reach in to fix her. But there was so much that needed to happen. Even more than I could do. I had to rebuild her, redesign her, so she could fix herself. Twist and tweak her blood cells to let them restore her nervous system and replenish her and fight the problem. Make them multiply faster. Make them stronger. Tougher. More aggressive.

Like a virus.

Sixteen hours after I got her home her eyes fluttered. An hour later her right hand twitched. I collapsed from sheer exhaustion after forty-two hours of forcing every bit of my energy into her, but not before I saw her lips move and heard her body shift.

I slept for thirty hours.

It wasn’t her. I could see that as soon as I woke up. It was just a thing, still strapped to the gurney. The eyes were wrong. Flat. Meredith was gone. Dead. I’d just brought back her body, like some superpowered life-support machine, its jaws snapping at me. I should’ve destroyed it, but I couldn’t.

It had her face.

So I kept hoping one morning her eyes would be normal again, that her skin would be warm. And she never was.

I had a funeral with an empty