Three thirty rolled around, and I went to my front door, smiling as I heard someone walking up the steps to my apartment. I opened the door and waved to Dale, who appeared awed by my act of “precognition” as he climbed the last few steps.

“How did you know?” he asked.

“You’re easy to predict.” I held up my hand to stop him from asking anything. “I’ve got a surprise for you. Let me lock up and we’ll go see a friend of mine. After that we can go on a patrol together.”

Dale’s eyes grew wide, and then he smiled like a kid spotting a huge present under the Christmas tree. “A real patrol? To look for bad guys for real?”

“Yes, a real patrol.” I locked my door and went down the stairs, making a bee line for the bus stop.

“Terry, my car—”

“No!” I yelled, coughing to cover for myself. “What I mean is, we have to travel incognito for this trip.” I grimaced when Dale nodded absently. “I lost you, didn’t I?”

Dale grinned. “Yep!”

Smacking my forehead, I walked over to him and put my hand on his shoulder, trying to think of the right thing to say. “We can’t use your car because the bad guys know to look for your gremlin. You’ve lost your stealth mode.”

I resisted the urge to kick him when he pouted.

Dale sniffled like he was on the verge of a temper tantrum as we walked to the bus stop, and he glowered at me. “How will riding the bus be any better? We have to wait a block before the bus will stop.”

“True,” I conceded. “But that’s still better than circling the block twice and missing the crime altogether. We aren’t using the bus to patrol, but we don’t want bad guys seeing your car where we’re going. We’re visiting a friend of mine, and he has a gift for you.”

“I thought you said I couldn’t meet any of your friends.”

“You’ve met Miracle Man,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but he’s a dickhead,” Dale muttered.

I laughed hard, almost falling over before I could get myself under control. “Why would you say that?”

“I may be thick, but I know when I’m being insulted.”

“But I insult you all the time and you never call me a bitch,” I said.

“Not to your face,” Dale said.

He looked like he had something else to say, but he decided not to under the intensity of my furious glare.

The bus turned out to be a big mistake for two reasons. First of all because it was late. I’ll get to the other reason later.

The missing bus had me grumbling over the fact that Dale’s car might have been able to get us to our destination faster.

I was so focused on my brooding, I almost missed the short, dark-haired man as he got out of a stretched limousine across the street. He was dressed in a sharp charcoal suit, tailor fit to his compact frame.

He crossed the street and smiled at me politely. I returned it, and I wondered where I’d seen him before.

“You don’t remember me do you?” he asked, uttering a short laugh when I shook my head. “It’s all right, I’m not all that memorable.”

“You seem familiar, but I can’t come up with a name.”

“I didn’t give it to you,” the man said as he offered his hand. “My name is Dustin Cloud, and we met at the Judgment Day monument.”

I nodded as I shook his hand. “That’s right, but you ran off when Miracle Man landed behind me.”

Dustin’s lips twisted in a sneer as he sat down at the other end of the bus stop bench. “My enterprising methods aren’t always legal. I’ve been looking for you because I have a job you might be interested in.”

“As a hero?” I asked.

“Good lord, no,” Dustin said, laughing jovially. “I want you to kill someone.”

“I hate to say it, but I’ve decided to be a hero. So I can’t just kill somebody for you.”

“Not even if they’re really bad?” Dustin asked.

I snorted, and my mouth tightened in an irritated smirk. “Do I look stupid to you? Obviously you want me to bump off a rival boss. But I don’t work that way. How about this? If you plant a suggestion that I want to kill this rival, then I can kill them when they attack me. That’s about the best you can get.”

“It could be difficult, but certainly not impossible,” Dustin mused. “You realize that they’ll most likely send a few flunkies at first.”

“Fine, I’ll kill them too,” I said.

“Good luck,” Dustin said, standing up. “I’ll give you a call to warn you when the flunkies are coming for you.”

“I don’t have a phone yet,” I said.

Dustin nodded, continuing to walk back across the street. “Yes, you do! Check your back pocket.”

Dustin slipped into his car.

“The hell I—” I began to shout, stifling a gasp as my palm brushed over a lump in the back pocket of my jeans…my very tight jeans.

I looked up to say something else, but Dustin’s driver shut the door and jogged to get back in the front.

The limo had just pulled away from the curb when our bus finally arrived. I paid for Dale and myself, sitting down near the front of the bus.

Then I took the phone out and looked at it, wondering how Dustin had slipped it into my pocket when his hands hadn’t gone anywhere near my ass without Dale or I noticing.

Then I looked at Dale and wondered if he could even notice the booger hanging from his nose. Obviously he didn’t, so I turned to look at the phone, deciding to test it by calling my mom and dad.

They weren’t home, nor was David when I tried to call him. I was about to try calling Greg and Sarah’s apartment when Dale tapped my arm.

I looked at him, noting with relief that the booger was gone.

Dale’s blissful expression was gone as well, replaced by an anxious scowl. He nodded his head ever so slightly at a man in a trench coat four rows away from us.

“He’s holding what looks like a bomb detonator from an action movie I saw one time at…uh, at the movies,” Dale whispered.

I patted his hand. “Relax, it’s probably…” I had nothing. Waving my hand in a dismissive gesture, I smiled. “Well, anyway we’ve only got one block left before—”

“Attention, vile sinners!” the man in the trench coat yelled. He stood up, dropping the coat to reveal a vest covered in dynamite sticks. “The day of reckoning is upon you!”

I was pissed that Dale had spotted the bomber before I did, but the fact that the raving dickhead broke into a fire and brimstone speech in the middle of my assurance that he wouldn’t set my teeth on edge.

“Give me a damn break already!” I shouted and stood up, freezing the detonator.

“What the hell?” the bomber cried. He shook the frosted plastic case to free it from his formerly sweaty palm.

He sighed with relief when it came free, but his eyes went wide when he realized that he’d dropped the trigger. His eyes followed it down, and he moaned in frustration when it shattered on the ground.

Putting my hands on my hips, I said, “All I wanted to do was ride this bus for one more block, but you just had to go all holy roller on us, didn’t you?”

The bomber flinched. I’m not sure if it was the anger in my voice or the windows of the bus glazing with ice, ringing along the hot glass with an eerie crackle.

“You just had to ruin my point that public transportation was safer than his driving.” I pointed at Dale, shaking my head. “I should kill you, but I’m leaving this up to the people on this bus, the ‘sinners’ that you were going to blast into bits.”

I glanced around at the passengers. “Who would like to see this man die?”

Only four people didn’t raise their hands.

I looked to one of them, a young man with an oversized Bling Bling T-shirt and a pair of headphones so big that they covered his entire neck.

Calming down, I tilted my head to one side. “Why do you think he should live?”

“We don’t have the right to say so. You stopped him, so a jury should handle this.”

“But if you were serving on the jury, would you call for a death sentence?” I asked.

“No, because you saved us,” the man replied and smiled. “He should go away for a long time, but I don’t think you should kill him.”

I smirked. “Okay, this is completely hypothetical, but suppose that he had succeeded. How the heck was I going to arrest him then?”

“You wouldn’t, but he’s already locked himself into a permanent sentence.”

I nodded. “Tell me your name.”

“Jamal Warner.”

Looking from him to the other three who hadn’t raised their hands, I smiled. “Do you agree for the same reasons?” Watching them nod, I glanced at the bomber. “What’s your name?”

“Dave.”

“Well Dave, four people saved your life. I was going to flash freeze your butt, but now I’m just going to arrest you.”

I walked closer to take the vest off of Dave, and that’s when the rat bastard sucker punched me in my left eye. His rabbit jab sent me flying back into an elderly couple across the aisle.

Growling, I grabbed the seatback to haul myself up and onto my feet. “Okay Dave, now you’re going to die.”

I leapt at the bomber, and the little turd screamed like a girl and ran.

I chased him down and caught the back of his vest, swinging him into a hand rail before slamming him into a seat so that the back of his head connected with the window.

The impact dazed him, and I tried to crawl onto the seat to take off the vest.

Dave curled into a ball and mule kicked me in the chest, sending me into the glass across the bus. It cracked, but didn’t break. I slid down and got to my feet just as Dave did.

I was faster to recover, and I jumped in front of him before he could make it to the emergency release for the back door.

We walked a half circle, and I was openly inviting the creep to try and make a run for it again.

I may have said I wanted to kill Dave, but in reality, I wanted this to be a clean bust.

Yes, that whole other rant with Jamal was me being melodramatic. I get that from my dad’s side of the family.

Unfortunately, a clean bust wasn’t in the cards for me.

Dave stepped back, and I took a step forward. I felt the detonator case crackle under my foot an instant before the vest exploded in my face.

This was my fault because my ice shredded the cheap insulation around the wires. Once the pure water melted and the wires were free, the slightest bump could have set that bomb off.

Wouldn’t you know it, I just had to be the lucky bitch to step on the wires?

Now, I’d like to take a moment to describe pain. Some pains make you say “ow,” and some pains make you scream for God and all the saints to kill you mercifully and get it over with.

Given the size of the hole in me, I would have liked to pick choice B. But I couldn’t choose either, at least not verbally. My vocal cords had been stripped from my throat, along with most of the flesh over my chest and half of my face.

The blast pushed me from the back of the bus to the front, punching my already shattered body through the windshield at a speed near three hundred miles an hour.

I could not pass out no matter how bad it hurt. I flew through the air, watching the world speeding around me with one good eye, and I prayed that I could pass out and get away from the pain.

The prayer wasn’t answered.

I bounced off the roof of a cab, snapping my arm and four of my ribs on the dome light. I got thrown back up and I think I would have laughed if I still had a throat.

I slammed into a windshield of a rig, and the driver stomped on his brakes.

By that point I had to wonder who I’d pissed off in the last week to earn that much pain. Perhaps I’d earned it all by letting Dale kill the robber.

My last thoughts before I hit the ground was a jumbled assortment of numbers. At the same time that I was calculating all the new pains I was feeling, I tried to figure out how many people died on that bus because of me. My head hit the street, and I felt a pop in my neck before the world thankfully went dark.

I woke up on a work table in Wally’s computer shop. Wally was standing over me, spraying me with a healing spray. My vocal cords hadn’t returned during the hour I’d been out, but the nanites had repaired enough damage to my nervous system for me to return to the land of the living.

Lucky me.

I thought this was the worst pain I could ever feel, but it wasn’t even close.

My vocal cords wouldn’t return for another two hours, and Wally used that time to explain that Dale had been pulling people off the bus through the front door the moment I started fighting with the bomber.

He and Jamal had stayed behind until everyone was off the bus. They and four others didn’t get far enough away.

Dale was running behind Jamal to get inside a building for cover. Dale’s body took the force of the blast, but Jamal was crushed between Dale and the plate glass window they were slammed into.

There had been eighteen people on that bus, including the bomber, Dale and me, so Wally kept drilling into my head that we’d saved eleven people from dying.

That’s what I kept telling myself too. I used it as a mantra to deal with the pain I was in. But I also realized someone else was in pain. I wondered if Wally had taken the time to tell Dale he’d done a good thing.

When my vocal cords finally slid back up to my throat, I made sure that the first thing I did was talk to my sidekick.

My vocal cords must have had to slither seven or eight blocks, because they felt extremely gritty when I tried to swallow. I coughed and spat up a ball of wet cement before I walked out of the back office.

I found Dale huddled under a blanket. Walking over to him, I knelt down. “Why are you so sad?” I asked, wincing at the agony of talking too soon. I forced myself to keep going even though my voice sounded awful, like I was gargling gravel.

Oh wait, I was.

I patted Dale’s arm with my less deformed hand and said, “You’re a hero for the second day in a row.”

“I killed that guy,” Dale said. “The one that told you he wouldn’t kill the bomber?” He looked at me, watching me nod. “He was helping me, and—when the blast picked us up, I wasn’t able to get my arms around him. If I did that, he wouldn’t have been…I didn’t mean to squish him!”

Dale started to blubber like a kid. This was the reaction I’d expected when he’d mutilated that convenience store robber, and seeing him fall apart for the right reasons now made me feel better about my decision to go patrolling with him.

“No, Dale, think harder,” I insisted. “You saved eleven people by getting them off the bus. You even tipped me off that the bomber was up to something. You did your job today, and you should be proud of yourself. You didn’t screw up this time.”

Dale sniffed and looked at me with a hopeful expression. “You aren’t just saying this to be nice to me, are you?”

“When have I ever been nice enough to do that?” I asked dryly.

In actuality, every word from my mouth at that point was said dryly. I was sending up plumes of dust as I spoke.

Dale wiped his eyes and smiled. “You’ve never been that nice.”

“And you can be sure I’m not doing it now,” I stated firmly, yet still dryly.

Dale watched me spit up a ball of blood and gravel, and he shuddered. “I still couldn’t save you.”

“I didn’t need saving. Those people did, and they owe their lives to you, not me. If you hadn’t gotten them off the bus, they’d all be dead.”

“So I’ve heard,” a woman said from behind me.

I spun and gasped (dryly) at Vicky, who was wearing a black blazer with a press badge on her lapel.

I’m not sure who looked more shocked, but I was faster to speak. “You’re a reporter.”

Nodding, Vicky stared at the floor to avoid looking at me. “Chet works as a personal trainer. I needed to get a job to move us into a better apartment than the slum he was living in.”

“You’re a reporter,” I repeated, and then shook my head. “The scoop of the century—”

“Is also the greatest lay I’ve ever had, so my lips are sealed.”

My mind clicked on an odd detail a moment later. “Hey, you know the slums you got Chet to move out of? Wouldn’t that be the same apartment complex I just moved into?” I asked dryly…okay, I’m sorry, and I’ll knock it off now.

“You chose them, but they are slums,” Vicky said.

“I know, and I think I chose them because my training is kicking in, just like Wally said. Wally also convinced me to go out on patrol with him.”

“Chet will probably be upset over that.”

“As Wally said yesterday, screw Chet,” I said…dry—no, I made a promise not to, didn’t I?

Getting back to the story, I once again tried to explain my side of things. “Today’s rescue was an innocent ride on the bus to see Wally before Dave, the messiah decided he needed to be a hero to Bonk, the god of stupidity. All I needed was one more block, but he just had to get up right then and there. Tell that to Chet. Oh, better yet, tell him how Dale saved everybody on the bus.”

“That’s why I’m here. The police told me how the superheroes Wally and Dale carried an unidentified hero’s body away. I realized that had to be you, so I got directions to Wally’s shop from Chet. I figured you were the body the police were talking about.”

“Then why did you look so shocked to see me?”

“Putting this mildly, you look like shit,” Vicky said. “Is there any reason you’re still naked?”

“I’ll stain any clothes I put on until my skin gets back from wherever it is, so there’s no point in dressing.” Pointing at the hole where my crotch should have been I asked, “What? I’m suitably censored.”

“Couldn’t you at least put on a towel? You are kind of hard to look at.”

I walked to the bathroom in the back of the shop, looking at myself in the mirror to find that I was still missing a lot more than just my skin.

Wally shrugged as he handed me a lab coat. “I tried using a healing spray on you, but I didn’t notice any change.”

“I should have mentioned that healing sprays don’t work if the missing part is still alive. My skin got blasted off, but my nanites won’t allow the healing spray to generate new skin cells. Oddly enough, my nervous system was complete, so you did repair that with your spray and that woke me up early. Thank you so much for that act of kindness.”

I spoke in a sarcastic tone of voice, and Wally flinched when he realized what he’d done.

“The machines treated the new skin growth as a disease and got rid of it,” I said. “That’s why I need Morgan to look over the programming my nanites have, because they’re acting very strange. One thing that has bothered me besides the weird way my healing factor works is the lack of augmentation.”

“I’m not following you,” Wally said.

“You got an increase in strength from your nanites, right?” I asked, and Wally nodded. “I didn’t. I’m no stronger than I would be normally.”

“Yes, but you were strong to begin with.”

“But nanites aren’t supposed to be selective in how they work. Why should mine be any different from yours?”

Wally shrugged. “You’ve got me. Nanites aren’t supposed to be able to reprogram themselves, but yours would have to be recoding themselves for the behaviors you’re describing.”

I looked up at the clock and sighed, making a decision. “I need you to take Dale to see Morgan. Fit him with a collar.”

Wally grimaced. “That sounds like a bad idea.”

“I’m sure it does, but I would feel better if he was just as invulnerable as you. The collars may not work for me, but I can ride either you or Dale during patrols. I would like to go with you guys, but I have to wait here for my skin. I’ve got a bad feeling it went with the bus to the scrap yard, so it could be another few hours before it returns. What I want for you to do in that time is get Dale used to wearing a collar.”

“Alright, but I’m betting he gets eaten by the chomps.”

“No, you’re hoping he gets eaten by the chomps. Just go.”

I looked down at the lab coat disdainfully. Slinging it over my shoulders, I stifled the urge to scream at the feel of rough fabric rubbing across thousands of raw nerves.

Returning to the front of the shop, I stood in front of Vicky.

“Is this better?” I asked while trying to smirk.

That’s not easy when one of your cheeks is missing.

Vicky shook her head. “No, not really.”

“That was my point,” I said and tossed the already stained lab coat away. I took Vicky to the back of the shop and sat down on the table to wait for my skin. I explained what I had done, and then I told her what I’d learned talking to Wally and Dale.

Vicky shook her head. “For someone who said they weren’t going to be playing the game, you’ve done quite a lot in establishing your name as one of the players.”

“I wasn’t trying to!” I insisted. “I just got on the bus, and I just went into the store, but I always seem to show up at the right time for trouble to find me.”

“But you just told me you’re planning on going on patrols with Wally and Dale.”

“Sure, but I’m not getting a costume or anything. I’m just going to wander around until trouble finds me. In City, I’m almost guaranteed to have success, right?”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Vicky said.

“The way I see it, my hobby for the summer vacation could also be a chance to work off all this extra energy that’s been building up since I was revived. With trouble looking for me anyway, the only option I have besides fighting is waiting for Chet to come rescue me, and I’d  prefer not to see him.”

Vicky pouted and said, “That’s harsh.”

“So what? I’m not a little girl, Vicky. I don’t need Chet acting like a father. I’ve got a father if I need to call him, so I’d appreciate it if Chet stayed out of my business for the duration of my time in City.”

“I’m sorry to hear you say that, but I will give Chet the message.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t have this attitude if he hadn’t taken to stalking me the moment I got into town. He’s being hypocritical, and even Dale thought he was a dickhead.”

“You talk like you expect me to agree with you. In case you failed to cash your last reality check, Dale is a psychopathic idiot, and you’re in a permanent PMS mode. That’s hardly the most stable combination for superheroes.”

“And Chet gets his kicks wearing women’s clothes,” I said. “None of us are completely sane anyway. As for our team, Wally is leading us.”

Vicky snorted. “Oh, good choice. In the three months that Wally has been in the game, he’s caught two shoplifters and one drug dealer.”

“Then we’re officially a team,” I said. “With me around, Wally will see a lot more action. I’m like Velcro for villains.”

“That’s going in the paper,” Vicky said. She turned when she heard a wet squishing noise, and she gasped as my skin began forcing its way into the shop around the bottom edges of the door. Some of it was folded up around the sides, pulling the rest of the stretched tissue through the narrow crevice.

It rolled away from the door and moved across the floor slowly, oozing a trail of blood that seemed to evaporate just seconds later.

Returning to a less flat and more torso-like shape, my skin slid to me and moved up into its proper place before closing around my chest, neck and right arm.

As with my vocal cords, my skin had picked up gravel and sand on the trip back. The nanites ejected it through my skin, and I was perforated with thousands of tiny holes.

The feeling was something like stigmata, I think, but on a more massive scale. Instead of a few holes, I had thousands of bleeding wounds that all stung, burned, and itched at the same time.

On a side note, I find it “funny” that painkillers don’t work on me. I found out after my skiing accident that only alcohol works for pain relief. Everything else is treated as a toxin.

The short story is that I spent a week in bed completely smashed to avoid feeling my back as it mended.

Yeah, and you probably thought I was just an alcoholic in training.

Well, I suppose I am, but at times, I’ve had a very good reason for relying upon it so heavily. It is my only option as a sedative, and as pain relief.

Of course, I didn’t have any alcohol, and as I still was missing part of my cheek, alcohol would pour from the hole to add its own sweet burn to the open wounds on my chest. Yeah, right. I’ll pass on that, thank you very much.

Despite experiencing excruciating pain all over my chest and neck, I was able to look at Vicky without flinching or whimpering. I asked her to leave and saw her to the door before walking back to the restroom.

I then proceeded to slam the door on my neck until it broke.

A Frosty Girl's Cure - Chapter 10, 5.0 out of 5 based on 2 ratings

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... I write dark fiction in a variety of genres. My blog contains my rants and rambles, and some short fiction that can only be found here. I can be pretty fucking offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.

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