The Law of Averages

Book 2: Chapter 43: Peeping Dan

The grainy, eighties-era television fast-forwarded through the recorded video of Coldeyes’ gang war. Dan stood beside Margaret as she fiddled with knobs and dials, searching for the moment that things kicked off. It wasn’t hard to find. The moment that the villain siren began to ring, panicked civilians streamed in through the lobby doors at almost a dead sprint. Some took up positions close to the glass windows, peering out curiously from their illusive safety bubble. Others kept running, hitting the stairs at the back of the building and hauling ass to higher ground.

It was the beginning of the day’s events, and Andros Bartholomew was still rotting in his cell. Dan watched each face anyways, carefully marking them down in his memory. He watched as the day shift manager for the Pearson scrambled around, shouting for order and calm. He was an odd man, rarely present, and somehow always frazzled. He seemed completely out of his depth within the stampede of frightened civilians.

There were protocols for businesses to follow in these situations. Much like fire drills, villain drills were very much a thing. Dan could vaguely remember seeing a chart hanging on a wall beside one of the elevators. Evacuation plans, and shelter plans. They should probably be retreating to the basement, to the Pearson’s basement bunker, but the villain siren hadn’t rang in Austin over a decade. Nobody had practiced for this, and it showed.

Dan kept an eye on the time at the bottom of the screen. He knew roughly when the attack on the FBI field office had occurred, and it wasn’t hard to extrapolate when Bartholomew had been freed from that. The time of travel from the field office to the Pearson, though, that was harder to determine. The matter manipulating villain had great, loping strides. It seemed like he was moving a decent clip. What had taken Dan several hours to walk, he might have covered in less than one. Could the mad scientist keep up?

Once again, Dan pictured the big Natural carrying Andros Bartholomew over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The scene warmed his heart.

Dan watched closely as the civilians eventually quieted, and dispersed throughout the hotel. He kept an eye out for suspicious activity, but only had the vaguest idea what he was looking for. Accomplices perhaps? But the more that he watched, and considered, the more he thought that the trip towards the Pearson had been an unplanned detour. It would neatly explain the first stop he’d found, the ladder and the alley, and the stored clothing. Something had changed the villains’ minds, and they’d kept going.

Nearly half an hour past the siren, and the manager seemed to remember the bunker. Even at four-times speed, it took him a few minutes to wrangle the scattered civilians into proper shelter. Some simply ignored him in favor of looking out windows, or even venturing outside. The Pearson had gone mostly unscathed during the gang war, and without any immediate danger presenting itself, most people were getting restless and reckless.

“Faster, please,” Dan requested. At this point, he’d completely discounted the civilians as collaborators. He couldn’t justify the decision by anything other than instinct. They just seemed… real. The panic, followed by relief, followed by boredom and stupidity, it seemed all too genuine.

Margaret obligingly fast forwarded the tape. Blurry scan lines began to appear across the screen as the speed ramped up, and Dan heard the sharp squeal of spinning video reels. Either the cameras in the Pearson really used VHS tapes, or someone had gone to the trouble of programming in the effect simply to stick to the theme. Dan was betting on the latter. The video quality was too high for VHS, and people in Dimension A were, generally speaking, completely insane when it came to their stupid gimmicks.

The timer clicked past the hour mark, a full hour after the field office attacks, nearly twice that since the villain siren had begun to ring, and people were beginning to file out. The siren finally stopped its chime, and things began to quiet down. The lobby emptied itself, as civilians went back to what was left of their evening. The sun began to set. Darkness crept in. Dan watched the shadows grow like weeds.

A flash of movement!

“Stop!” Dan exclaimed.

Margaret complied. The tape froze. Someone stood on the street outside the lobby, peering inside. Dan’s skin crawled, his hairs rose on the back of his neck. It was too far away to see features past the tinted glass, though the build indicated male. His clothes looked normal, just a shirt and trousers, but the stance… The man loomed menacingly. At who, Dan couldn’t begin to imagine. There was nobody inside, yet he stared, fixated, at the lobby’s interior.

“Is there a camera out front?” he asked. “Same timestamp.”

Margaret clacked away at the keyboard. The screen shifted perspective. The camera was positioned directly over the entrance, while the stranger was off to the side, but Dan could at least see him more clearly. The man’s hair was matted and wild, its length impossible to tell through the wild snarls. His clothes were clean but damp and ill fitting. His hands hung loosely at his side, elbows spread out slightly, like they were used to resting against the pockets of a coat.

But Dan couldn’t see his face.

“Alright,” he said, slowly. “Double speed, please.”

The video accelerated. Trees rustled at unnatural speeds. Passerby walked up and down the street and jogging speed. Cars blitzed past. The light faded like a theatre right before the main show. The man stood absolutely, completely, unflinchingly still. He stared inside, and his body moved not an inch.

The timestamp ticked ever upwards. Thirty minutes. The man stood outside for thirty full minutes, just… staring. At an empty lobby. Dan had Margaret flick back to the indoor camera, just in case. Nobody and nothing. Even the implacable woman seemed disturbed by the stranger’s eerie imitation of a gargoyle. There was a growing certainty in Dan’s mind. He knew of only one man this cracked in the head.

Finally, the stranger turned to leave. Margaret paused the video without Dan’s prompting, and they stared at the man’s face, revealed at last. He was young, pale, with eyes more wild than the last time Dan had seen them. He’d traded in his horn-rimmed glasses for something that Steve Urkel might wear. Comically gargantuan and thick rimmed, they hung off his face like a haphazardly applied sticky note.

It was unmistakably Andros Bartholomew. Sure, he’d grown a thick goatee— No. Dan squinted at the screen. That was a fake beard, the kind you’d get in a costume shop. He could literally see a small dollop of glue on the corner of Bartholomew’s mouth, where the adhesive had smeared. The man was a lunatic.

Dan couldn’t help but notice that his old enemy had all of his limbs. Dan distinctly remembered removing at least one of them, and mangling the other. They didn’t appear to be prosthetics. The terrorist could regenerate his own body parts? Good to know. Dan wouldn’t bother to take him down so gently the next time he saw the man.

He pulled out his phone, and snapped a photo of the man’s face.

“Let it run,” he requested.

Margaret tapped her keyboard, and the video resumed.

The mad scientist took ten steps away from the Pearson, before stopping. He cocked his head like a confused puppy, now facing towards the street, before his entire body reoriented in a different direction, like some kind of marionette pulled along by a string. He crossed the road, ignoring the crosswalk and the blaring horn of a car barely stopping for him, and was gone.

Dan licked his suddenly dry lips.

“Thanks Maggie. This was important. You mind if I take the tapes?”

She eyed him carefully. “I think you better. How are you gonna explain this to the police?”

He’d told her the truth: that he’d discovered his power could track one of the escaped villains, and he’d been reckless enough to actually do it. She hadn’t been thrilled, but the trail was several days old. It should’ve been safe. Ish. That said, he wasn’t about to go broadcasting his activities to the police, no matter how much they liked him.

“Coincidence,” Dan replied. He glanced at her. “I don’t get on with the manager. I wanted to watch him panic during the attacks, and got you to show me the video. We left it on play while we talked, and I noticed Bartholomew.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Watching a man panic during a villain attack? That’s in poor taste, don’t you think?”

Dan shrugged. “I knew the Pearson wasn’t hit, so you could argue it’s harmless. I’d rather look like an asshole than a potential vigilante.”

“Are you?” she asked pointedly. “A potential vigilante, I mean.”

Dan clenched his jaw. “No. But I’m also done waiting around for people to do their jobs. I’ll help out where I can, then back off before things get out of hand.”

She stared at him, then quietly pressed a button on a nearby terminal. A DVD popped out, and she slotted it into a case, then passed it to him.

“See that you do. Stay safe, Daniel.”

“You know me,” Dan said, taking the case and pocketing it. “Safety is my middle name.”

She shook her head. “Abby would be heartbroken if you went and got yourself killed. And Anastasia would be insufferable.” She looked at him, hard. “Think on that, the next time you want to do something reckless.”