Lee
"Budgie" Barnett is a writer of comedy and of comic books. He first
broke into the business with three stories in Imperium Comics' TRAILER PARK
OF TERROR, before getting his first big break with Marvel in X-MEN UNLIMITED
#4, which hit the shelves in August 2004. Well known in the UK Comics industry
for the annual Hypotheticals panel
he devised and presents with Dave Gibbons at the UK Comics Festival, he's been
described as being to accountancy what Indiana Jones is to archaeology. He currently
writes GOING CHEEP at the Pulse.
The Guardian, 15th October 2003 The Book of Revelation is not part of the Old Testament, as we mistakenly stated in the article on 22nd September 2003. It is the final book of the New Testament.
Unlike Ian Davies, whose desk usually looked like a bomb had it hit, or more accurately several bombs, Dr Betty Grable was far less satisfied with her desk. In contrast to Davies, her work area was customarily pristine. She’d once spent two hours looking for a report that had slipped under her keyboard and the embarrassment factor (which had been legion) had ensured that it would never happen again. She never tired of commenting about colleagues’ desks that “if a bomb hit it, the bomb wouldn’t do any damage – it would just move the damage around a bit.” What those colleagues said about Grable’s typical insistence on a tidy desk isn’t recorded, but if it were, no doubt it would have included the words “retentive” and “anally”, though not necessarily in that order. Grable’s desk was an example to everyone at the company on structured organisation, planned clear thought and controlled work.
Until now. She’d just spent the last hour, since the astonishing meeting with Toster and Docherty reading the files and papers on the material, reviewing every scrap of information she had on it.
And five minutes ago, she’d realised that there was one sheet of paper missing.
The office no longer looked need and tidy. It looked like a small tactical explosion had taken place, with ground zero being two feet above it. She had opened every folder, looked in every file. It wasn’t there. In a mark of desperation, she’d even lifted up her keyboard but there was no sign of the sheet of paper.
There was a knock on her door and she said “come in” without raising her head from the waste paper bin.
The door opened and Jez Docherty walked in. He was surprised because the room looked empty. Messy like you wouldn’t believe, but empty. And then as he watched in some bemusement, what he’d taken to be a white sheet thrown over an area in the corner moved and then rose and turned vertical. He realised he’d been looking at the rear of Dr Grable, but thought it best not to mention it.
“Yes?” asked Grable as she turned and looked at her visitor. “Oh! Sorry,” she politely said, feeling anything other than polite. She didn’t trust him. She couldn’t have said why but she didn’t. It was just a feeling, but she considered herself an excellent judge of character. And she was… as long as you excluded men who she found attractive. And, crucially, as she’d have been the first to admit, Docherty was attractive. Six feet four inches tall, with close cropped hair, he had, she’d noticed, perfect teeth and hazel eyes, a combination that was always dangerous for her.
Usually, this was the sort of physical type she very much found attractive, which was the curious thing. She didn’t like him at all. She wasn’t sure of the reason, but then he opened his mouth and in that split second, she realised that it was sheer and utter prejudice on her part: he was ‘work’, and that meant that he was off-limits. She’d gotten involved with a colleague a couple of years earlier, one of those Christmas party things that lasts longer than expected. And in her case, ‘longer than expected’ had meant longer than the party. After a couple of months, the pair of them realised that they had nothing in common other than work and that wasn’t enough for either of them.
Grable shook her head and gave a mental shrug. She’d learned her lesson and learned it hard, She gave her attention to Docherty, who was smiling as he looked at her.
“Not a problem,” said Docherty, who knew that Grable neither liked nor trusted him. It wasn’t that he could read Grable at all. He was just someone who naturally assumed that no one liked or trusted him. It didn’t bother him, not with the job he had.
He took another, obvious, look at the room. “Lost something?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Grable. She wasn’t inclined to say what and to her surprise, Docherty didn’t pursue the matter.
“I was wondering,” Docherty said.
“Yes? What about it?” replied Grable.
“Well, some minor questions, really. Nothing too important, but they’re questions I’d like answered, if you can.” He gave her a half-smile which Grable discounted immediately. If she’d have known that six people had seen that exact same smile mere seconds before suffering severe injuries at the hands of the man smiling, she might have been less confident.
“Mr Docherty,” Grable said, shifting some papers off of her chair and from the visitors’ chair in front of her desk. She gestured with her head to the now empty chair. “Sit down,” she said and then moved to her side of the desk. She looked around briefly and then with a mental shrug, dropped the papers on the floor before sitting herself in her chair. “Mr Docherty,” she said again, “There’s nothing I can tell you that’s not in the report I gave Dr Toster, a report you’ve no doubt already read.”
Docherty was still standing and Grable smiled good naturedly at him. “Look, the least you can do, since I went to the effort of clearing you a space is to sit down.”
Docherty smiled back at her. “You’re right.”
“Yes?” asked Grable.
“Yes,” said Docherty. “It’s the least I can do… so it doesn’t matter whether or not I do so, right?”
Grable shook her head partly in bemusement, partly in disbelief. “What do you want, Mr Docherty?”
“As I say, just a few questions.” Docherty reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a small notepad, took a pen out of the spiral binding and flipped open the notepad. “You said that the material could be mutagenic only if it was exposed to dead tissue.”
“Well, yes, it would have had to have had the heat and force applied to it first, but…” She didn’t get any further before the next question came and when it did, it astonished her.
“What would happen to the dead tissue?”
“I beg your pardon?” She looked at him with surprise.
Docherty leaned against the wall, his notepad remaining in front of him. “The tissue that was exposed,” he said. “You know, exposed to the material. What would happen to it?”
“It would constitute part of the combined vapour that would form as a result of the exposure.” Grable was puzzled. She couldn’t understand where he was going with this.
“Yes, yes, but what about the rest of it?” Docherty was quietly persistent. But persistent he was.
“What rest of it? There wasn’t any ‘rest of it’. In the trials, the dead tissue was utterly consumed...” Grable stopped. There was something there, but she wasn’t sure why alarm bells had started ringing in the back of her head.
Now Docherty pushed up from the wall and moved to the chair. He sat, and crossed his legs, the perfect creases of his trousers catching the light for a moment. “Ah…” he said, understanding that he was watching her brain click into gear.
He waited for a moment. “It’ll come, give it time,” he said, and only got a look from her that, had her hair been formed of snakes, would have turned him to stone. He watched her intensely and a few seconds later her eyes widened as she made the final connection. “There it is,” he said.
“We only used grams of material, a thousand at max.” The words came at a rush, a fair representation of how her mind was racing.
“So, you’ve no idea what the effect would be if the dead tissue was, say, 190 to 200 lbs? And was previously a career criminal named Samuel Withers?”
There was a long pause, before under narrowing eyes, the mouth of Dr Betty Grable said simply, “no”.
“OK,” said Docherty. “Next question – I’ve only two more. Where did the material come from?”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees as Grable considered her answer. “America,” she finally said. She watched Docherty write the answer down and then said “A small farm outside a town in Kansas,” she finally said, waiting for Docherty to make the connection. She was hoping for the same time lagged response she’d had to go through a few minutes ago. She was disappointed as Docherty put down the pen.
“Really? I suppose it was called Smallville,” Docherty said, without a smile. “Dr Grable, this is serious business. I’d be obliged if you’d actually tell me the truth.”
“The truth? I don’t know where it came from. We were given it under a contract from the Ministry of Defence. We’ve always referred to wherever it came from as ‘The Site’.” Grable shrugged. “It’s not unusual; we get sent material all the time to work on.”
“OK, where do you think it came from then?” asked Docherty. “Best guess, doctor.”
She pointed up at the ceiling. “Somewhere out there. There were elements in there that I’d never seen before, and that were unidentifiable. Who knows, maybe it did come from Krypton.” She smiled to take the sarcasm out of her tone, and was only partly successful. “You had one more question?”
Docherty sighed. “OK, to the best of your knowledge, experience and guesswork, what mutagenic changes could occur to a hypothetical person? And I stress, could, not would.”
“Ah, that one I can answer. I’ve a list of everything that I could conceive happening to someone who was exposed to it under the circumstances you outlined earlier.” She reached behind her to the printer, pulled a sheet of paper from on top of it and handed it to him. “There you go.”
Docherty looked at both sides of the paper. They were equally blank.
Davies waved at the security guard as he left the agency. He wondered whether he’d be waving when he left the building the following day, or whether he’d be escorted from the building.
He had a lot on his mind, to put it mildly, and he felt like walking. He came to a pedestrian crossing and paused, waiting for the lights to turn in his favour. After a minute or so, he glanced at the lights and was gratified to see them turn green. At last, trivial thought it might seem, something in his favour. He didn’t notice that for the rest of the walk, every traffic signal turned in his favour as he approached it.
He’d been walking for about an hour when he yawned. He put down his bag and stretched his arms above his head. When he’d done so, he was irritated to note that his shirt had come out of his trousers. He pulled it back down and found that it only fitted in when he pulled it tight. He yawned again and automatically stretched again. This time he felt a tightness at his back and heard material tearing. What the…?
He took off his jacket and reached around to feel his shoulder blades. He could feel a soft breeze blowing across his back and with a start, knew that he’d torn his shirt. This was getting stupid. He put his jacket on, knowing that it was, to put it mildly, highly unusual for someone to grow after they’d reach eighteen. Davies was equally convinced that whatever his body was going through, he needed to get it checked out in a hurry.
He didn’t want to go to his local doctor, as he knew that once there, he’d have to explain to his hypochondriacally inclined doctor that what was happening to him was, he knew, impossible. But that it was happening anyway. He wasn’t quite sure why he continued to stay with a doctor who was convinced that he himself had every illness going, but he was, perhaps, the best diagnostician Davies knew. And when needs must…
Davies crossed the road, waving a quick thank you to the drivers as they let him pass, and then fumbled in his pocket for his mobile phone. He walked past the local cinema which had an Anthony Hopkins season playing, and was almost knocked over as a crowd of noisy teenagers came along the street, talking far too loudly. For a moment, Davies wondered if his hearing had suddenly become hyper sensitive, but then he rationalised that he had always found crowds of teenagers too loud. Noticing an alleyway running down the side of the cinema, he ducked into it, pulling the successfully located mobile phone out of his pocket at the same time. As he entered the alley, the light dimmed slightly and he hoped that he could get a signal. He looked down the alley and noticed that it ran for some distance. He was, for a moment, stuck by how a city’s architecture always seemed to develop its own style. You could never, for example, mistake the alleys of New York for those of London, nor the alleys of Johannesburg for those of Toronto.
He flicked through the phone’s memory and swore as he remembered that once again, putting his doctor’s phone number into the mobile phone was yet one more thing that he’d never quite gotten around to. He got his diary out of his inside jacket pocket and was looking up the doctor’s number when he heard raised voices. Still with his mind on whether or not that he’d be able to get an emergency appointment, the voices suddenly grew in volume, together with a child’s scream, quickly hushed. He looked up and saw in the shadows down the alley that there were three adults and a small child some way ahead of him. While he was putting the diary away, he felt as if a wave of dizziness assaulted him. For a moment, he couldn’t see them clearly and then, when he blinked hard, it seemed as if they were rushing towards him, as the area, several hundred yards away, snapped into focus. And what he saw turned his blood cold.
A well-dressed middle-aged woman held her small son to her body, trying to get him behind her, her other hand half-covering the single string of pearls around her neck. By her side, a tall broad moustachioed man was trying to calm down the third man, who wore a peaked cap and held a gun in front of him, pointing it at the family.
Davies started to run towards them, and as he did so, he threw the mobile phone at the third man. He had no idea why he did so, but the phone, thrown with incredible speed, rocketed towards the man, hitting him on the arm, just below the shoulder. There was an audible crack! and the man cried out in pain.
When Davies was thirty yards away, he realised that he was moving far faster than he’d ever run before, and on instinct, he threw himself at the mugger. He left the ground and hit the guy doing twenty miles an hour. The man didn’t have a chance, and he hit the wall close by, leading to more sounds of injury. He slid to the ground, barely conscious. Davies stood in shock and started shaking from the effort. He felt a touch on his arm and whirled around to find the man with a moustache looking at him in disbelief.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Davies didn’t get a chance to respond, as his peripheral vision picked up the mugger aiming the gun at them, and he spun around reaching towards the man on the ground. There was a loud noise and the Davies didn’t even realised he’d reacted by the time he did, throwing himself into the air, beating the almost 900 miles per hour of the bullet. It hit his shoulder, gouging out a wedge of flesh and muscle. He landed and while his body was still registering that it had been shot, Davies picked up the man with his other hand and threw him twenty feet away onto a pile of rubbish bags, feeling some satisfaction as he saw the man fall hard.
“Bloody hell! Are you ok?” asked the now rescued mugging victim, prompting a giggle from the man’s son. “Mum! Daddy said a naughty word!”
For some reason that struck Davies as very, very funny and he started to laugh. “Yeah,” he said in reply, “I’m fine.”
Then he fainted dead away.
This week’s artist: Roxane Grant Roxane Grant is a graduate who now works in Camden. She also likes travelling and has moved from South to East London. She can be contacted on roxanegrant@hotmail.com.
