The Amazing Otis Vale

Chapter 5

Otis looked at them for a moment. Then he looked down at his right hand. He made a fist, slow and deliberate, feeling the way the muscle and bone and everything underneath it gathered and compressed with a solidity that had not been there before. He could feel the energy sitting in it, coiled and patient.

He needed to know if it was real.

He turned slightly to one side, away from the steps, and drove his fist downward toward the stone of the driveway. Not touching it. He stopped the punch three inches above the surface, pulling the strike at the last possible moment, and let the force release through the air beneath his knuckles.

The sound was a crack, low and dense, like something splitting.

The stone of the driveway directly below his fist cratered. A clean hole, perfectly rounded, edges sharp, depth of about four inches into solid stone. The impact had not come from his skin touching it. The shockwave from the air alone had done that.

Otis straightened up and opened his hand. He looked at the hole in the stone. He looked at his fist.

"It was real."

Something moved in his chest. Not the power. Something quieter than the power. Something that had been sitting at the bottom of him for a very long time, cold and tired and heavy, and was only now beginning to understand that things were different.

He turned back toward the steps.

The two guards had seen the hole in the driveway. Both of them were no longer standing still. One had grabbed the radio on his belt and the other was already moving down the steps, one hand raised, the professional instinct overriding the shock.

“Hey, stop right there—”

Otis did not stop.

He moved toward them and it took very little. It was brief. Controlled. One guard went sideways into the stone pillar at the bottom of the steps with enough force to sit him down and take the fight out of him immediately.

The second barely had time to grab Otis arm before Otis shifted his weight in a way that redirected the grab entirely and left the guard stumbling forward, off balance, one knee coming down on the wet stone with a sharp grunt, with his on finger slap he went down cold on the ground.

Otis looked down at him. 

“I don't have time for any of you, my moths life comes first” he said quietly.

Then he left.

**

The  General  hospital was loud and bright the way hospitals always are.

Otis came through the main entrance in his ruined shirt and pushed through the crowd in the main corridor, moving toward the emergency wing because that was where his mother was, that was the only thing in his head, getting to his mother before anything—He heard it before he turned the corner.

Crying. Raw and uncontrolled, the kind that comes from someone who has passed the point of trying to manage themselves and is just making noise now because the body insists on it. High and desperate and breaking on every other sound.

He rounded the corner into the emergency corridor and stopped.

A young woman in a black dress was on her knees on the floor, both hands pressed to her face, her whole body shaking with it. She was beautiful in the way that grief makes some people beautiful, stripped down to something essential, every pretense removed. In front of her, a gurney was being moved slowly toward the far end of the corridor by two nurses who were no longer moving with urgency.

The woman on the gurney was not moving at all.

Pale as chalk. Eyes closed. Hands flat against the white sheet. Chest still.

Emty stood there and he felt it go through him like cold water, because he had just run to this hospital for this exact reason, for a mother lying exactly like that, and he had not gotten here in time for his own but he was standing in front of someone else's and something in the knowledge he had just been given was already telling him what it was seeing.

He looked at the woman on the gurney.

Not gone. Not quite.

There was a flicker there. Barely. The kind that a person with ordinary eyes would never find. But he was not looking with ordinary eyes anymore.

“She's not dead.”

He said it without deciding to say it, stepping forward, the words out before he had consciously chosen them.

The corridor reacted immediately.

Heads turned. The two nurses pushing the gurney slowed. The woman on the floor lifted her face from her hands and looked up at him with swollen red eyes, and for one second there was something in them, something raw and reaching and terrified to hope.

“Excuse me?” one of the nurses said, and the tone of it was not a question, it was a correction.

“He said she's not dead,” someone in the nearby crowd repeated, and from the way they said it, they found it funny.

“Brother, what are you doing?”

A man near the wall straightened up and pointed at Otis. 

“The doctors already confirmed it. Don't go messing with a grieving family.”

“This is not the place for whatever this is,” another voice said.

“I'm sorry, but you need to step back.” One of the nurses put a hand out. “The patient has been declared. There is nothing—”

“She has a flicker,” Otis's said, looking at the nurse directly. “Very faint. But it's there. I need two minutes.”

The nurse stared at him.

“Two minutes,” he said again. “If I'm wrong, you've lost nothing.”