Pulse

I remember the exact moment it happened; the adrenaline coursing through my veins, that immense surge of power that I felt, the feeling that I was strong enough to accomplish anything. It was a sensation that I knew I could never duplicate, because the changes I was going through would become normal to me. My gift would no longer be supernatural, at least, not to me.

It was about a week after my professor conducted that odd experiment in biology. Whatever he had us drink made me feel strange every day after. Most of the other students hardly reacted at all, which is exactly what he said would happen. He explained that it would probably only affect a select few and that we would even react in different ways. I remember thinking I was going to die, my kidneys could barely process whatever it was.

Besides the constant need to puke my internal organs out, there were some very peculiar occurrences that I couldn't explain. I could smell the alcohol on my father’s breath from my room whilst he was arguing with my mother from downstairs, swearing up and down that he hadn't been drinking. I could solve math problems much quicker when I was struggling to even comprehend certain formulas less than a week ago. Perhaps the strangest thing of all were the mornings I would wake up and objects around my room would be moved inches, sometimes feet from their original resting place.

My alarm clock, my watch, my socks, my textbooks, anything that was less than fifteen pounds looked like it had been slightly pulled towards me. At first I thought I was imagining things, but then I carefully used a marker to keep track of where I left things before bed. Sure enough when I awoke they had been moved.  I had been skipping classes, panicking that I might be going insane. I tried to email my professor but I got no response. My parents didn't seem to care that I had been missing classes or that it smelled like I was hiding a body in the bathroom due to my repeated vomiting. They were too busy working or yelling at each other over divorce-related threats.

And then that fateful day came, the day that changed my life forever. I woke up feeling reincarnated with no sickness, no aches and no pain. The only abnormality remaining was the fact that I emerged from my slumber surrounded by all of the household items in my room. I had to talk to my professor and find out what in the hell he did to me. I arrived and the class was entirely empty, not a soul in sight. I ran to the Dean's office and he told me the class was temporarily cancelled due to the firing of Professor Stevens. I asked if it was because of the experiment. He said "What experiment? He was fired because he completely vanished!” That son of a bitch, he's put me through Hell and now he's gone?

I rushed home in frustration, with an anger that could not be calmed. I was hurling insults at by-standers who didn't get out of my way quick enough, even more so than your average New Yorker. I took a shortcut in a back alley to get to my house before I killed someone. Then what felt like an aneurism hit me like a truck. I went blind for a split second and heard the sound of metal scraping against the concrete. Initially I thought maybe some thug hit me over the head with a bat but when I turned around there was no one, just a dumpster that was in a different spot than when I had passed it. 

I chalked it up to more stupid side effects of the poison I was tricked into consuming, dusting myself off once I recovered. I was too frustrated to care, I needed answers, I needed to find professor Stevens and get to the bottom of this. I’m sure some light detective work on Google could turn up some leads. I turned around to continue on my way and instantly, the foul screech of the dumpster being dragged across the ground echoed through the alley. I flailed around and screamed at the top of my lungs "ENOUGH!" and in one swift motion the dumpster easily flew twenty yards into a brick wall. I stood there, stunned, and amazed at what had just happened.  "Very nice" I heard a familiar voice proclaim behind me. I jerked around to identify the stranger. And there he was, "I think we'll call you, Pulse." said Professor Stevens.

An ominous fog rose from the ground around him and crept along the alley directly heading towards me. I tried to move, to run in the midst of my confusion, but I was frozen with fear. In mere seconds, I was surrounded by this mysterious veil of shadows. He did something to me truly horrific. His power, is a monstrous ability, one I had hoped to never face again. I was somehow outside of my body, looking at myself from a few feet away. I watched my eyes melt out of my sockets and vile insects crawl out of them. I saw my skin riddled with boils and lesions bursting with pus. I watched fragments of my brain ooze out of my ears. I watched all of these hellish things unfold, and then, there was nothing.

I woke up in the dead of night lying in the middle of the alley. My muscles ached and my head was ringing violently. I didn't understand any of what had happened. He had powers, I, had powers. I had a million questions pouring through my mind, how could this even be possible? I stared at my hands as I walked back to my place. Dirt was floating from my hands into the air, I couldn’t believe it, I was a superhero. Distracted, I stumbled into a construction site a few blocks away, abandoned deep into the night. It was a massive skeleton of a building, tools scattered haphazardly across the perimeter. I shrugged my shoulders, “Fuck it”.

I lifted my hand in the direction of a stack of steel beams since that’s what I did when I threw the dumpster. I assumed my ability was telekinesis due to the incident with the dumpster. At least that's what I thought it was, but something interesting happened. I didn't just lift one steel beam. The entire pile rose slowly, drifting along. It was like I had altered the gravity in the immediate area. In fact, I did. I tried the opposite, attempting to bring them down. The beams came crashing down at a rapid pace from me increasing the area's gravity. I looked at a forklift behind the beams and tried to give it a gravitational pull, sure enough, the beams were yanked towards it. "Excellent." I heard a voice behind me declare. 

It was Stevens, again. "What do you want? Why are you following me?" I hardly even gave him time to answer my questions; I was so flustered by everything. "Why won't you leave me alone? What did you do to me? How did you even find me?” He chuckled at my confusion. "Charles, or should I say Pulse? That experiment we did in class was just the beginning, this is the true experiment. The next step in human evolution can be found in a suppressed gene in our DNA. I merely helped speed things up by bringing the gene to fruition." "Why?" I barked. "Why not? Aren't you interested in what we can become? I am intrigued to see which of my students rise to save the weak and which succumb to the power they possess." "So you've been stalking me all this time? Are you trying to kill me?" He shook his head. "I do not wish to kill you, just observe. It helps that I can appear invisible to others." "Then why did you attack me?" I yelled angrily, my blood was boiling. He laughed before speaking, “Well I had to see what I can do too. Life is one big experiment and we’re all just in it, existing as different variables and possibilities. Trillions upon trillions of outcomes occur on a daily basis. I just wanted to conduct an experiment of my own.” He grinned at me, it was too easy for him, messing with people’s lives for some sick experiment. I didn’t even have a choice, how could I have known?

I rushed at him, manipulating the gravity around me to jump higher. I gave myself a substantial gravitational pull long enough to yank him towards me but quick enough so that nothing else was pulled to crush us. We collided in the air, floating and spinning as if we were in space. I punched him square in his face; he grunted and returned the favor. He grabbed my neck and started punching my gut repeatedly. In an instant I extended my hands to his chest and shot him a good few yards into a fence. The focus of energy interrupted the low gravity I had created and knocked me on my ass. I tried to get to my feet as quickly as I could, but it was too late. The terrible fog that he controlled was all around me. Before I could react, the ground beneath me was gone. I was falling, thousands of feet above the earth. I knew it wasn't real, but I could feel that drop in my stomach. I was brought back to reality by Stevens going across my face with a 4x4. It was a solid hit; my face was stinging with excruciating pain. I rose and chucked a wheelbarrow in the direction he had hit me from, but he was gone, he had gone invisible again. I could hear his voice, but it echoed throughout the abandoned site. "Your power is great, but in these coming months we will see a plethora of super-powered beings be born anew. Perhaps it is a bit twisted to subject a class full of students to something like this against their will but it's all in the name of science." "If you gave it to the wrong person they could kill someone" I chimed in. "That's a risk I was willing to take, nature must be allowed to take its course." I closed my eyes, ignoring him scoffing at me. I breathed in, calming myself for my next move. All at once I bent my knees and spread my arms out, reversing my gravitational pull into a push, knocking back everything in a twenty-yard radius with a shockwave of energy.

It was in that moment that I felt the immense surge of power. I hit him, knocked him out cold. I couldn't really call the police; tell them I could control gravity and that there was a man who attacked me with hallucinations. So I left him there and ran home, faster than I ever have before in my life. My parents were asleep, not worried in the slightest that I had been missing all day. I laid down in bed, internally freaking out about everything, my mind racing almost too quick to process anything. I just laid there all night, staring at the ceiling, no idea what to do next, where to go from here. Just as my eyes began to close, my entire body wearing from exhaustion, I heard an unearthly noise, followed by the scattering of papers from my desk. I shot up and looked in the direction of my desk; it was my friend Michael who had just appeared from thin air. "We need to talk." He proclaimed.