FIFTEEN

The wet tarmac glistened ahead of him in the moonlight, a seam of pure onyx bisecting the countryside. He missed this sensation, almost like flying except instead of wings he had two wheels and an enormous engine throbbing between his leather clad thighs. He knew he should be wearing a helmet but the roads were always empty this early in the morning and the wind coursing through his hair made him feel alive. There was nothing quite like ripping up country lanes as the farmers were waking, his engine thundering an alarm call like a horny stampeding bull snorting its approval at cows over the hedgerows.

He rounded the chicanes with ease, coasting past rolling dark green fields as the sun poked its head over the horizon and began to flood the valley with golden hues, tracing shadows along the thin black line. He pumped the accelerator and leant into the bends, concentrating on the road, ignoring the speedometer. He was almost there now. Not to a physical place like London or the supermarket, but somewhere else, somewhere in between all the other places. And as he roared around a long left hand turn, he finally found and held on to, the Edge.

As he straightened out and throttled up again, his motorbike refused to obey and he wobbled violently, desperately wrenching the bars back with all his might. There was a sudden screech as the bike toppled, crunching into the tarmac, grinding through a hedgerow and into a muddy field as he held on atop it, every sinew fighting the inevitable shredding he would receive should he let go. But all of his efforts were not enough, and as he slipped and flew towards the looming earth, he noticed that his left arm had, for some reason, decided to disappear.

A brilliant white flash filled his vision as if he had fallen into the morning sun, and he felt it too, a burning sensation that scorched at the left side of his body. He bounced like a ragdoll thrown by an angry child, cart-wheeling blindly through the wet mud and grass before coming to a hasty stop against an old oak tree, surrounded by cow pats and thistles.

As Bruce lay staring up at the blue through the branches, he watched an enormous black cloud drift across, covering the entire sky with malevolent, swirling energy and the air became suddenly still, crackling with loss of mass as if it were being sucked away, up through the void above. A mighty thunderclap boomed, enveloping him entirely, driving him in to the wet mud, and forked lightning flashed brilliant against the splintered sky. He had found the eye of the storm, and it watched him now, squirming in the muck.

He had been here before, not too long ago. He knew two things would happen now. Blue lights would soon flash through the gloom to herald his rescue by two green-jacketed NHS knights. A very pissed off farmer would make the emergency call whilst waving a shotgun at him and calling him a townie. And he knew that it would rain.

He considered for a second that that knowledge made him more powerful than the Met office, a God even, compared to somebody like Michael Fish. But then he remembered that the Michael Fish wrong weather prediction incident had happened years ago, and that nobody, not even him, cared for the reference. It wasn’t funny or clever. Michael Fish had probably retired, living fat on a BBC pension fund. The first droplets of moisture hit his cheek, rousing him from his waking trance.

He sat bolt upright. The rain didn’t feel cold as it usually did; instead it felt warm, thick and substantial somehow. At this point, he would usually wake up and wipe the sweat from his clammy forehead with the back of his palm but he remained rooted in the field. The liquid grew hotter and hotter as it ran down his forehead and bounced from his leather-clad shoulders. As he watched the liquid run down his black gloved hand, his fist began to hiss and a strange white vapour trailed up towards the dark vacuum. His forehead began hissing too, a terrible sound that did some justice to the searing agony he felt as his skin melted away from his skull. He reached up and touched the bone with his rapidly disintegrating fingers, petrified that he would feel the soft squelch of his brain, but his finger and skull came together with an intriguing metallic clank. He looked at his fingers; the glove and skin beneath had been washed away by the heavy rain to reveal a system of pistons and metal rods. It was how he imagined his bionic arm looked beneath the cosmetically-appealing false skin.

He stood up against the rain, which had worked its way to torrential status by now, and looked down at his body. All of his flesh and clothing were gone, lost to the downpour. He was curious to discover that his skeleton appeared to be entirely made of some sort of chromium alloy. He watched with interest as the complex arrangement of valves and pistons powered his movements as he took a step out from beneath the oak tree.

Oak tree however, was no longer the correct description for the shadowy arrangement of golden beams that spanned above him, dripping from a central silver column that swayed in the downpour. At its foot, the thistles and cow dung were replaced by glowing rods and pools of bubbling mercury. The thick mud around it had turned into rusty sheets suspended haphazardly above another void as dark as the sky above. The sheets shifted around beneath the force of the rain, writhing like tectonic plates as the acidic liquid dripped through the cracks between them. Bruce’s footing became very unsure as he began to traverse the field. In the distance, just over the barbed, torn mass that had once been a hedgerow, he could see a faint blue light approaching.

He clanked slowly from sheet to sheet, his leaden feet sliding out from under him more than once as he dragged himself towards the jagged scar in the hedge-wall where his motorbike had broken through. There was no longer any trace of the bike itself save for some dark crimson stains and gelatinous gristle that defied the current of the corrosive rain where it had lain. Droplets lashed at his eyes, venomous strikes from a sea of snakes that eroded pits in his chromium form but he didn’t feel a thing. He could see the lights clearly now flashing away merrily, incongruous on the other side of the great rusty barrier.

As Bruce stepped gingerly onto the penultimate sheet, a sudden shift caught him unawares and sent him skittering towards the void. His clunky metal limbs thrashed about wildly, desperate to find some purchase. His face clattered off of the corroded floor as he slowed to halt with his legs sprawled out over the serrated edge. As he clung on for dear life, he knew that he would not be pissing off any farmers today.

He turned his head and threw all of his weight to the right and heaved himself back onto the plate, barely noticing at first the object that lay, remarkably unscathed, on the scarred metal surface. A human arm, flesh and blood, four fingers and a thumb, lay twitching two feet away. It was his arm; he would know it anywhere, like the scent of an old girlfriend. He knew it, quite literally, like the back of his hand. Carefully, he picked up the limb and went to place it back into the empty spot at his side, but before he could touch the flesh to his metallic endoskeleton, a terrifying thunderclap boomed deafeningly above him sending all of the metal plates spinning apart from each other with terrific force. The lights and the wall and the thing that was the oak tree disappeared in the blink of an eye as he attempted to cling on for dear life but there was no grip. He watched as his arm flew from his grasp and out into oblivion and then he plunged, scrabbling and screaming, from the sheet, accelerating headlong into eternal darkness at terminal velocity.

Bruce woke up on the back seat of his car with a crisp packet stuck to his cheek. His clothes were clammy and stuck to his skin. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with his good hand and picked up his phone; McCoy had rung him, six times. It was now 8:37 PM and dark already; winter must be coming in fast this year.

His terrible rust-bucket of a car was parked outside a fancy looking block of apartments with lots of big glass windows mounted in the front. McCoy’s building. But how had he gotten here? He remembered leaving the University, climbing into his car, feeling tired, so tired...

He swung the car door open with a heinous creaking, squeaking sound and breathed in the bracing evening air. He needed to get his game face on; it was Johnson time. He locked the car up, gave it a kick and straightened his fedora as he walked to the front door. He rang the bell for apartment four and waited, remembering horrible viral Youtube videos to get into the part. McCoy’s voice rasped through the intercom.

“Is that you, Johnson? Where the hell you been?”

Bruce held the button to respond. He sang, low

“Chocolate rain?”

McCoy buzzed him in, responding through the intercom as Bruce opened the door.

“What the fuck did you just call me, chocolate rain? You’re late, cracker-drizzle! Get up here; we’ve got work to do. The world is not going to save itself!”