But all that was for another day. Right now the doctor’s brain felt stuffed with cotton batting. Conducting scientific experiments while on Thorazine was difficult to say the least. Among other things, he needed to see if he could add some kind of amphetamine to the Thorazine to improve his own functionality. But for now he needed to sleep. He could examine the data with a clearer head in the morning.
Chandler could feel Keller moving outside his room, but the doctor’s brain remained closed to him. He was like a finger pressed against a taut scrim, discernible in outline only. But at least Chandler knew when he was there—and when he left.
He waited twenty minutes to make sure. Only then did he attempt to fire himself up again. It was difficult. He was so tired. All he wanted to do was sleep. In fact, he was sleeping. What he wanted was to be in a coma. But he had work to do. And it was the doctor who had shown him how to do it. It wasn’t going to be easy, however. Not on him. And not on Sidewalk Steve either.
Deep inside his paper cocoon, warm, sweating, safe, Sidewalk Steve felt his body start to change. His muscles, grown slack from a diet of scavenged sugars and starches, began to firm, to bulk. His bones, soft from years without calcium or protein, hardened, lengthened. He had known the dark man and the mad scientist wanted to change what he was. He had thought they wanted to make him into a monster. But now he realized: they wanted to make him a hero. A superhero. A super soldier, to be precise.
Captain America.
He’d been Sidewalk Steve’s favorite hero when he was growing up, not least because they shared a name, but also because Steve Rogers had been a bullied weakling like Sidewalk Steve, only to be transformed by the Super-Soldier serum into an avenging angel. Now he, Sidewalk Steve, would take up that mantle.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the stasis capsule. Several months, no doubt: it would’ve taken a while for the serum to achieve its full transformation of his body. But when the capsule’s cover hissed open, Sidewalk Steve felt as though he was emerging from a single restful night’s sleep.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror mounted in the wall. His muscles bulged through his rags—a bit more Incredible Hulk than Captain America, but hey, this was a new era, right? Men in tights probably wouldn’t be taken seriously by the average American.
Now, to get out of this cell.
The door appeared to be made from tempered steel. It looked like it wouldn’t budge if a speeding truck rammed into it. But he was more than a speeding truck. He was Sidewalk Steve.
He slammed a foot into the center of the door. It rattled on its hinges like an alarm clock, but remained in place. The vibration traveled up the bones of his ankle. For one brief moment it felt painful—it felt like tibia and fibula were splintering along their seams—but then the sensation passed, was nothing more than a tingle, a tickle. He was Sidewalk Steve. He was indestructible.
Again he kicked. He felt the door give, just slightly. A small dent appeared in the steel sheet.
He set his mouth in a scowl of grim determination. This was going to take a while.
On the other side of the wall, Chandler heard the dull thuds of Sidewalk Steve’s foot striking the door. He also felt the stress fractures in the man’s ankle, the multiplying microbreaks in his tarsals. It took all his concentration to keep the image of the invincible hero front and center in Sidewalk Steve’s mind, to suppress what would have been paralyzing agony as the bones of his foot and leg splintered and ground against one another.
It took fifteen minutes for Sidewalk Steve to kick down the door, which was in fact made of steel, but was fortunately hollow. When, finally, it buckled on its hinges, Sidewalk Steve’s leg also buckled—or, rather, snapped just below the knee—but as he fell to the floor Chandler managed to switch the image in the vagrant’s brain: he was a werewolf now. The full moon was shining down on him through a skylight, causing him to transform into his half-human, half-lupine state.
On all fours, Sidewalk Steve crawled from his cell. He sniffed at the locked door next to his, smelled the imprisoned damsel on the far side of the wall. He hoped his strange appearance wouldn’t frighten the poor maiden out of her wits.
He didn’t want to admit it, but his leg hurt. Well, heroes felt pain too, but they kept going anyway. That’s what made them heroes.
Nevertheless, he trotted down the hall in the opposite direction. No need to kick down a second door if he could find a key.
The hall spilled onto a large open space crowded with tables piled high with lab equipment. He went from table to table until he found a set of keys that he picked up in his mouth, then galloped back to the other locked cell. Once there, he realized he needed a hand again, to open the door. As he transitioned back to his human shape the pain in his leg hit him. He wobbled, spots danced in front of his eyes, his spasming fingers dropped the keys.
Concentrate, Chandler! a voice screamed in his brain. He didn’t know who Chandler was, but there wasn’t time to worry about that. A damsel needed saving.
It took both hands to lift the key chain, and they were shaking so badly that it took a dozen tries before he managed to slip the right key into the lock. It turned. He pushed.
The door fell open and Sidewalk Steve collapsed on the floor. Chandler could just see the man’s ruined right leg, the foot trailing off the ankle like a fish on a line.
The LSD was almost completely out of his system now, but he was still strapped to the table. If he couldn’t get Steve to free him, all of the pain he’d inflicted on the vagrant would have been for nothing.
“Steve, please. You have to get up. You have to untie me.”
On the floor, Steve moaned.
Chandler gathered his energy. He had seen the damsel in Steve’s mind—a gypsy-looking girl with ridiculously large breasts bursting from her ludicrously low-cut blouse—but he didn’t have the energy to sift for something more believable. He pushed. The walls melted into a mountainous vista, the hospital bed faded away, replaced by railroad tracks.
“Hurry, Steve!” the gypsy girl pleaded. “The train is coming!”
Steve lifted his head. When he’d pushed open the door, an image of the fire demon who’d attacked him earlier had floated before his eyes, but it was gone now. The damsel—a very masculine-looking damsel, with a jaw like Steve McQueen’s—lay trussed on a pair of gleaming railroad tracks. He couldn’t see the train but felt its rumble in the ground. He didn’t have the strength to move, but he had to find it. Had to save her, even if she wasn’t quite as pretty as he’d first thought. It was still his duty. His purpose in life.
He pulled himself up with his hands. Each moment was an agony. Spastic fingers pulled ineffectually at the ropes.
“Hurry, Steve!” the damsel called in her curiously deep voice. “Don’t give up!”
But he could only free one of her hands. He looked up to see the train barreling down on them, then slumped atop the damsel’s unfortunately flat chest. At least she wouldn’t die alone.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, just as the train ripped through their bodies.
It took another ten minutes for Chandler to work himself free from the table. In the course of searching the factory-turned-laboratory, he found a bottle of morphine, and he shot ten ccs into Sidewalk Steve’s arm in the hopes that it would keep him unconscious. He also found an ampoule of LSD, which he pocketed.
Melchior and the doctor might well kill Steve if Chandler left him here, so he hitched his hands under the unconscious man’s arms and dragged him toward the door. For a big guy, he didn’t weigh nearly as much as Chandler expected—and, as well, he, Chandler, wasn’t nearly as tired as he thought he’d be after four days on his back. He suspected his freshness was somehow related to the changes LSD had wrought in him, but he wasn’t sure how. After all, increased physical constitution and the ability to project images into other people’s minds didn’t seem to be related, unless there was some kind of physiological connection he didn’t know about. It would have been fascinating to investigate, if it wasn’t his own mind he was contemplating, his own body.