Bolts from the blue

Prompt: Your protagonist discovers that everything they want comes true. What happens next? 

Luke lifted his fingers from the keyboard and lay back against the hospital pillows. He rested his hands on the bed beside him, his laptop open in front of him on the table that a nurse had pushed into place.

Monitors and cables and cords surrounded him. A metal stand lurking beside his bed held a bag, a drip line leading from it to the back of his hand. The room smelled strange.

Writing on his laptop had drained him of the little energy he had, especially working around the drip line feeding into his hand. Luke closed his eyes and tried to remember how he came to be here, with every muscle and bone in his body feeling as if they had been pummeled in a blender. The story he was writing about his new superhero would have to wait for his second wind.

He had no recollection of being hit by the car, an accident he’d apparently been lucky to survive, but he did remember that gorilla Leo Sandler and his mates giving him a hard time all afternoon at school. They’d been harassing him for as long as he could remember, surrounding him every time he was alone, tripping him, pushing him in the back, chucking his lunch in a puddle, sending threatening messages to him on his phone, getting the girls he liked to go all bitchy on him too; they were relentless. Sandler and his gang bullied others as well and had even sent one teacher off on stress leave, but whenever they saw him it was like he was a beacon to them.

He just wished he had the guts to stand up to them. Uncle Ben had given him a few tips but he just couldn’t follow through. Luke was just one person and there were five of them. He just wanted them to leave him alone. Sometimes in his dreams, he became Thor, or Ironman, or Captain America, and pulverized the gorillas into mashed potato. But one thing was for sure: none of his superheroes were around to save him on the day he ran straight in front of that car, trying to get away from Sandler and his lemmings.

The surgeon had explained that to straighten Luke’s spine, they’d attached eight titanium bolts to it through a keyhole opening in his side. They’d had to puncture a lung to be able to get to the spine, and he had a patchwork of surgical tape over his rib cage as proof of several invasions.

Pain shot through his body like it was being drip-fed into him and he felt sure the eight titanium bolts the doctors had used to put him back together were bursting through his back. He imagined that’s what it felt like when Wolverine slashed through flesh. With his hand shaking now, he reached for the button that would flush morphine through his system and sluice out the torturous beast that lurked inside him.

A man appeared at the end of his bed, just as the evil throbbing was surrendering to the painkiller. Luke thought it was the surgeon who’d performed his operation, but he couldn’t really tell through the mist that had dropped over his eyes. “You need to allow your body time to adjust to your new back,” the man said. “You have a very special type of titanium bolted to your bones and you need to be aware of its properties.

“This titanium will form a thermal isolation layer inside your body mass,”  he continued. Luke opened his mouth to ask what that meant. Pre-empting his query, the man continued:  “This will help to promote tissue repair and regenerate your body. You will feel a reduction in pain, a general positive feeling, and you will sleep better. But more than this; you will also have improved strength, and a balanced electrical current through your body as a result of the titanium will counteract any negative electromagnetic waves in your environment.”

Luke’s felt his eyes growing heavy and the doctor’s face wobbled. “You may even find that the bolts will make you feel superhuman,” he heard the man say from the ceiling of his room. “This is a special kind of titanium that reacts to the amount of adrenaline created in your body by stressful events and will transform that adrenaline into a very powerful and positive energy. These bolts will be your friends, and when you respect the will and the good that is in you, then you will know how to use them.”

What a strange thing to say, Luke thought. He opened his eyes to ask another question but the man was gone. Luke stretched out in the bed as much as the stitches and medical tape would allow, and to his great surprise, he found his pain had subsided. He felt his body relax, singing with relief. The bolts felt as if they were humming, all vibrating at different frequencies, sparking neurons in his brain.

Inspired, he sat up. Pulled his laptop closer. He wanted to get his thoughts into his story immediately, before the idea disappeared. “Eight bolts,” he wrote. “Octo. Octobolt. CAPTAIN OCTOBOLT!” At last, he had a name for his superhero. His fingertips flew across the keyboard to keep up with the thoughts clamoring to be recorded: “Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, and Theta.” The first eight letters of the Greek alphabet; that made sense. Naming the eight bolts like this was great progress if they were to become ‘friends’, as the man suggested.

Luke found he could isolate each one of them if he concentrated, and he especially gravitated toward Zeta: a confident, independent being, always wanting to help people around him. Zeta would be his alter-ego, Luke decided. Collectively with the others, they were Captain Octobolt.

Pleased with the developments in his story, Luke could barely control his grin. He dropped his hands down onto the bed again and looked out the window.

A scream erupted from the street below. He could hear it as if he were standing right there. Leaping out of the bed as if injected with jet fuel and leaving his drip hanging by his bed, Luke was at the window in a nanosecond.

Down below in the street, he saw Leo Sandler with a few of his gorillas. Were they hanging around the hospital to rub salt into his wounds? They must have felt intense schadenfreude about his misfortune and come here to gloat, Luke thought. Then he saw the source of the scream: a woman about the same age as his mum, crimson with rage as Leo tugged at her handbag and the other boys surrounded her, taunting her as she refused to let go.

Luke’s bolts throbbed below the surface of his back and he felt a wave of energy so intense stream through his body that he almost fell over. Before he knew what was happening he found himself in the street in the midst of the melee and the handbag snatchers were unconscious, stacked on top of each other, and padlocked to a nearby bike rack. The woman stood frozen to the spot, her jaw slack and her bag dangling from one hand. But before she, or he, could register what had happened, Luke was back in his hospital bed, just as stunned.

The strange man appeared again, sotto voce voice trickling through the air.

“So, Luke, you’ve passed your first test. You will find these things happening to you more and more as your operation site heals and the titanium bolts in your body develop their full potency.

“You will find that you now share the properties of titanium or Ti. Whenever your adrenaline kicks in, the special titanium in the bolts will be activated and its high tensile strength will allow you to achieve some phenomenal feats.

“But remember, your operation does not change who you are. You are still the same great kid you were before your accident, but you will have to learn new ways to do things. You will also need to take good care of your back. These bolts will help you if you use them properly.

“The bullies will continue to come, but if you use your talents wisely they will soon learn respect, not just for you but for others as well. You are Captain Octobolt.

“I am Zeta, and I am here whenever you need me.”  Then the man vanished once more.

Luke reached for his laptop again. He had just the right superhero now, and it was right inside him.

# ENDS 1437 wds