The Law of Averages

Chapter 103

It’s a damn good thing that Marcus had insisted on first aid lessons for Dan. The man had been an actual medical doctor before he had turned to teaching and took personal offense at anyone unable to properly suture a cut. He had been very thorough in his emergency triage training, having loudly explained that everybody should have a basic grasp of human anatomy, and how to piece it back together, in case of sudden and unexpected violence. What Dan had first dismissed as a ramshackle justification to make him suffer was paying off in spades now, as he attempted to stabilize a bleeding out mad scientist.

Dan’s decision to use his power on a living—if incorporeal—human had resulted in what one might generously describe as a ‘slight maiming’. Andros Bartholomew’s right leg was simply gone below the knee, with the exception of some dangling meaty bits that Dan was trying to not look too hard at. Dozens of long, thin strips had been removed from the man’s other leg. It was so mangled that Dan suspected it might have been kinder to have tossed the villain into a wood-chipper.

The reason Dan could identify all these wonderful details was simple. Bartholomew’s power affected his clothes, which were now in tatters. The once pristine lab coat was hanging by bare threads, and his pants were as shredded as his legs. His glasses were nowhere to be seen. His shirt was sporting several new holes, and what little Dan could see of the man’s chest was covered in razor-thin cuts.

But none of these minor disfigurements neared the devastation that was his face. Whatever the doctor had put in his nasty little capsule, it was less a toxin than an acid. The brief, two second exposure to the liquid had badly melted Bartholomew’s face, turning him into something of a burn victim.

Dan felt little sympathy for that. The bastard had put that stuff inside of him. Dan’s only concern was the difficulty people might face in identifying the villain at a glance, now that he was missing most of his physical features.

On a completely unrelated note, Dan was desperately relieved that his power did not work on humans in normal circumstances. The possibility of doing something like this on accident, to a completely consenting non-villainous person was enough to make him queasy. He’d hate to have to put back together someone he actually cared about.

Which brought Dan’s focus back to the present, and to the softly moaning, slowly dying scientist before him. For a man missing half of his leg and probably a chunk of his femoral artery, Andros Bartholomew was not bleeding all that badly. It was something that Dan had noticed the first time he’d used his power against the man, and he was glad that the pattern had held true. That said, there was still an alarming amount of red liquid pouring onto the floor. As much as Dan would not mourn Bartholomew’s passing, he found that he couldn’t quite bring himself to just watch the man bleed out.

And if some deeply buried part of his mind noted that the mad scientist would likely suffer a lot longer if he lived, well, Dan would never admit it.

With his course of action decided, Marcus’s medical training kicked in, and Dan set to work. Without knowing where Andros had stashed Dan’s go-bag, Dan could only pillage his home’s medicine cabinet for supplies. He busted open his personal first aid kit, then his back-up one, and reappeared in the little doctor’s office.

Andros had progressed from groaning to weeping, and he had almost managed to crawl his way out of the entrance to the room. Dan quickly grabbed him by the less mutilated leg, and pulled him back inside, a task made much easier by the red lubricant that was splattered across the floor. Ignoring the increasingly agonized protests, Dan set about disinfecting the wounded areas. He dipped the villain’s stump in coagulant, emptied the rest of his QuikClot on mangled-but-still-attached limb, then pulled out a half dozen rolls of gauze.

About halfway through wrapping the first of many wounds, he considered just trying to teleport Andros to an ER. The mad scientist was mostly incoherent, but Dan figured a good slap would send him back into his mist state. Though, considering the man hadn’t yet done that himself, it was entirely possible that something unfortunate would occur. Or maybe Bartholomew was simply petrified of Dan repeating his splinching trick. Regardless, Dan quickly concluded that the likelihood of the terrorist arriving as more meat paste than man was unacceptably high.

It only took him a few minutes to cocoon Bartholomew’s two limbs in gauze. The beleaguered terrorist had passed out at some point during the brief operation, though his pulse was about as steady as could be expected given the circumstances. Dan briefly considered finishing his patch job by suturing up the many cuts along the man’s body, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Now that the man was no longer in immediate danger, Dan had much higher priorities.

He whipped out his phone, confirmed that it still had a signal, then called Abby. She picked up on the second ring, greeting him in a cheerful, chirpy voice that was completely at odds with his present situation.

“Danny! How are you?”

Dan blinked at the general lack of alarm in her voice, but quickly realized the reason. She was his emergency contact for… just about everything. She should’ve been the first person to have been contacted once his disappearance had been noticed. If she didn’t know, then nobody had noticed yet.

She wasn’t even in the state at the moment, so she probably hadn’t realized that he was on his training mission; he doubted that the fire was getting anything more than local news coverage. He… hadn’t thought to tell her, either. That was going to get him an earful.

“Danny? Is everything okay?” she asked after several moments of silence.

The concern in her voice made him wince. He braced himself for the impending explosion, and said, “Now sweetheart, don’t panic, but I’ve got something I need to tell you.”

It didn’t take long for Dan to summarize his situation but by the end of it, judging from the stony silence on the other side of the call, he was soon going to be wishing that he could’ve delayed his judgement.

“Let me see if I understand this,” Abby said, with all the quiet of a storm about to break. “You forgot to tell me that you were going on your training exam, which apparently consists of jumping into the remains of a burning building. Then, you got yourself kidnapped by trusting someone you know is untrustworthy. Then, after escaping, instead of calling the police and staying put, you went back and tried to stall your kidnapper, in some insane attempt to buy time for Connor’s uncle to arrive and enact some sort of personal vendetta. Does that sound about right to you?”

“Um.” When she put it that way, it sounded a lot less clever and impressive. “Maybe?”

“Have you called Officer Graham yet?” she demanded.

“No,” Dan replied quickly. “I wanted to make sure you knew I was alright.”

“Call him, now,” Abby ordered quickly. “Tell him what’s going on. Be polite, because it’s going to be up to him to determine whether or not you’re charged with breaking some kind of vigilante law.”

“What?!” Dan yelped. “I got kidnapped! How is this my fault?”

He heard a sigh. “You went back, Danny. You were safe and sound. You got away, then you went back and picked a fight.

“Ah…” He had done that, hadn’t he? It had seemed so reasonable at the time. “I just figured Cornelius would be grateful.”

“He most likely will be,” Abby said, “but he’s also a professional. You can’t count on him just letting you walk off. If he’s half as responsible as his record indicates, he’ll probably have to bring you in for questioning. I’ll look for a good lawyer, just in case.”

Dan swallowed heavily. “Right. Thanks Abs.”

“Stay safe Danny. And call me when you can.”

With a click, she was gone. Dan sighed, staring angrily down at the unconscious mad scientist. He prodded the man with his foot, grunting, “You might’ve caused me a lot of trouble, jackass.”

Another deep breath, in and out, then he dialed Cornelius Graham. The SPEAR Team member picked up instantly.

“Sitrep!” he barked into the phone.

Dan floundered for a moment, before settling on, “Stable.”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, before a heavy sigh. “That’s not a report, Newman. What’s your status? Are you safe? And is Bartholomew still at your location?”

“I’m okay,” Dan confirmed. He paused, eyeing the prone form at his feet speculatively. “Bartholomew is down. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

“Define down,” the surly officer demanded.

Dan opened his mouth to relay what had happened, then paused. He quickly glanced around the room, confirming a lack of visible cameras. The walls didn’t seem to have the infrastructure to support such technology, rotten as they were. Bartholomew had to have some form of monitoring though, as he’d rather quickly realized that Dan had woken up, but Dan was betting on something more exotic than a simple camera. The toxic tracker, maybe? Perhaps it was monitoring his vitals. Or maybe some other form of exotic observation that Dan simply wouldn’t know about.

There was just enough doubt, that Dan was willing to creatively reinterpret the truth, at least over the phone. Maybe he’d admit what actually happened when he was in a position to not accidentally implicate himself.

“He threw some gas at me, and I tried to teleport it away,” Dan summarized weakly. “Turns out the gas was him. Now he’s, uh, missing some bits.”

Cornelius swore for several seconds, before asking, “He alive?”

“Yeah, I patched him up,” Dan admitted.

“Good. I’ll be there in five minutes. Sit tight, Newman.”

Dan nodded to himself. “Sure thing. Be careful getting to me, though. He implied that he’d trapped the place. Make sure to warn your team.”

“It’s just me, Newman, and this isn’t my first rodeo.” With that, Cornelius ended the call.

“Just him?” Dan murmured, his mind racing to explain the man’s lack of backup. He didn’t get very far, as Cornelius’ estimate was right on the nose. Five minutes of pondering was interrupted by a series of loud clangs and low thumps, from somewhere nearby. Moments passed, then, accompanied by the screech of tearing metal, a reinforced door slid flat across the floor, settling by the entrance to Dan’s little room.

He stared, too surprised to flinch, before shrugging it off. Dan quickly decided that the odds of this new intruder being yet another enemy were rather low, and called out, “Officer Graham?”

“Newman! Stay where you are!” the officer’s moderately familiar voice replied. Another clamorous screech rang out, and, with a grunt, a suspiciously turret-shaped hunk of machinery whizzed past the doorway. The tall form of Connor’s uncle followed shortly thereafter, vaulting onto the reinforced door with a grunt.

He quickly glanced over Dan, then down to the mummified body of Andros Bartholomew, then, with growing incredulity, to the demolished room and large bloodstains covering the entrance floor.

“Things got a little violent,” Dan noted unnecessarily.

The bewildered officer took a calming breath. “I can see that. What happened to his face?”

“Oh, that.” Dan considered how he could possibly spin the teleportation feat that he had achieved as a result of his mutation, and settled for skipping it entirely. “Acid.”

“Acid,” Cornelius repeated.

“I guess so,” Dan replied blandly. “You’d have to ask him exactly what it was. It was technically his, I just threw it in his face.”

“I see.” There was that weary sigh, again. Cornelius knelt down to examine Dan’s field dressing. “These are competently done.”

“I was literally taking the final exam for my emergency response class when he kidnapped me,” Dan pointed out.

“Yes, the fire.” Cornelius glanced back up to him. “Fortunately, the chaos that he caused will make things significantly easier for us.”

Dan cocked an eyebrow. “How so?”

“It appears that nobody has noticed your disappearance. You said that Bartholomew captured you by faking a nausea attack? Stick with that. You inhaled too much smoke, and passed out, but you teleported home first. I’ll bring in Bartholomew. I can say I tracked him here, somehow. He’s a known villain and terrorist, so any testimony he gives about you will almost certainly be disregarded. Most likely, he’ll be questioned on his ties with various terror organizations, then quietly executed. You’ll be kept out of it.”

Dan stared at the man in front of him. Was he actually trying to cover for Dan?

“What about Matilda?” he asked cautiously.

Cornelius looked grim. “I’ll see that she’s dealt with. I’m sure Mr. Bartholomew here,” he gave the unconscious mad scientist a vicious kick in the side, “will be happy to corroborate their affiliation.”

That seemed uncharacteristically generous, coming from someone who had threatened Dan within ten minutes of meeting him.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

A frown crossed the officer’s face. “Doing what? Helping you?”

Dan nodded.

“You called me,” Cornelius pointed out. “Me. Not the police. I assumed that this was the outcome you wanted.”

“Well, yeah,” Dan admitted sheepishly, “but I was expecting more resistance from you.”

“You’re dating an heir to the Summers fortune, have been a good friend to my nephew and his fiancée, and have delivered unto me the cause of my nephew’s suffering.” The man’s steely gaze locked onto Dan, filled with all the gravitas of his well-earned position. “Duty is duty, but this is a family matter. Now get out of here. It’s going to be difficult enough finding this fool’s recording devices; I don’t want to have to delete any more than necessary.”

Caught off-guard by the abrupt dismissal, Dan nodded. “Right. I’ll just, uh. I’ll go. Bye.”

“Oh, and Newman?”

Dan paused, turning to face Connor’s uncle.

The man gave him a vicious, satisfied smile.

“Well done.”

Dan nodded to him, then stepped out of the world. It was time to go home.