The Inside-Out Man, Part 3
Paging the Silver Stranger.
Welcome to Olympus City, where super-powers, physics-defying tech, and unearthly creatures are all possible now. Human nature, however, remains unchanged.
No one is born a perfect superhero, but a few strive to live up to the ideal anyway.
Previously: Not even the Golden Gladiator could stop the Inside-Out Man, but Ken believes a certain friend might be able to help.
Part 3
Alyssa resorted to asking Mrs. Wilkins about her cats. She had no interest in the old lady’s pets, but she had even less interest in her private thoughts. So, cats.
“Oh, wow, that is a lot of kittens,” Alyssa said while scraping plaque off of Mrs. Wilkins’s front tooth. She missed comfortable silences.
Whenever the dental probe left her mouth, Mrs. Wilkins seized the opportunity to share more fun facts about cat breeding. Alyssa wondered if the woman’s stray thoughts might have been preferable after all.
However, Alyssa hadn’t reckoned with her own stray thoughts. Mrs. Wilkins mentioned a feral cat, prompting Alyssa to recall something she had overheard Miranda thinking—a super-powered feline on the moon, a deadly cat, so deadly that Miranda needed to kill it to save herself.
Miranda never told her that, though. She told Ken. The two of them had more in common these days. They were Ultra Woman and Mr. Amazing, after all. Neither informed Alyssa, the former Silver Stranger. Then again, Alyssa hadn’t exactly set a strong example of sharing.
Dr. McMillan arrived to discuss Mrs. Wilkins’s X-rays, and Alyssa attempted to anchor her wandering thoughts and focus on her job.
Alyssa.
That didn’t help. Various mental chatter wormed its way through her mind each day, and she had gotten in the habit of tuning out most of it. Occasionally, someone thought about some other Alyssa, and it always threw her off. But this wasn’t that. Someone was calling out to her.
Alyssa. Can you hear me?
Someone who sounded like Ken. Alyssa could indeed hear him, but she couldn’t respond. Receiving thoughts was far easier than transmitting them. Or so she assumed. She never bothered to develop that particular skill. She probably could have, if she wanted to.
I’m on my way to your office. I’ll be right outside your window. We have an unusual situation.
An unusual situation in Olympus City. That went without saying, and it usually went without Ken or Miranda dragging Alyssa into it.
She wanted to dive into Ken’s brain and extract all the updates. Bizarre images were already bleeding through, and they made no sense. Was that man inside out?
“Alyssa?” Dr. McMillan said. “Did you hear what I said?”
Alyssa had not heard, but a quick telepathic scan caught her up.
“Sorry, yes, we’ll keep an eye on that crack in thirty-one.”
As Dr. McMillan prepared Mrs. Wilkins for the possibility of a crown, Alyssa pulled together a sample of toothpaste and dental floss. She had lost track of Ken but expected to hear him when he arrived.
Cat-related small talk dragged on. Dr. McMillan did a much better job of feigning interest than Alyssa had. Mercifully, he wrapped things up sometime within the eon, and Alyssa sent the patient on her way and sent herself on break, which she expected to be a misnomer today.
Alyssa retrieved her cell phone to check the news. A voice message was waiting for her. Voice, not text. It was as surprising as a man walking around while inside out. She suspected a spam call, but the number belonged to a college friend, Roni, whose voice sounded fatigued and fried from the start.
“Hi, Alyssa. Please call me back when you can.” Roni’s voice cracked. She was clearly trying to dam her tears. “It’s … it’s about Skyler.”
Alyssa hung up. She’d call later, but she already figured out the message. Skyler had died.
He had slipped into a coma months earlier. Alyssa traveled across the country so she could enter his brain and pull him out. All he had to do was take her hand, just take her hand and let her guide him back to consciousness, but the stubborn fool refused. Skyler chose to waste away in the refuge of his own mind.
And now he was dead.
Alyssa, I’m here. Outside your window.
Alyssa dried her eyes before turning to the window.
She didn’t see Ken at first glance, but she heard him. He was pressing himself flat against the brick wall, aiming to be as invisible as possible.
Alyssa opened the window and stuck her head out.
“What the hell is going on?” She nearly harangued him for violating the precious secret identity rules—rules she never liked in the first place, but she had grown accustomed to not meeting with superheroes while wearing scrubs. She worried who else might enter that back alley and spot him. What if her boyfriend, Ford, decided to take out the trash at his martial arts school a few doors down?
The thoughts exhausted themselves with their own pettiness. They were a reflex, but Alyssa couldn’t bring herself to care. The uncharacteristic malaise that hung around Ken concerned her far more.
“Can we talk on the roof?” she suggested.
Ken gave a weary nod, then lifted them straight up to the shopping center’s flat rooftop. Even up there, under the sunshine, Alyssa still felt exposed. But she got over it.
“I wouldn’t come here if it wasn’t necessary,” Ken said.
“I know. I saw some of it in your mind.” She quickly added, “I wasn’t trying to—”
“It’s okay.” He truly seemed too exhausted to let the intrusion bother him. “Go ahead and look at the rest. That will paint a far better picture than I can explain. Just be careful. It’s … unsettling.”
Alyssa already knew what an understatement that was. Nevertheless, she took a step closer. “I’ll try to stick to current events.”
“I know you will.” A weak smile formed under the mask.
Closing her eyes, Alyssa absorbed the scene as Ken remembered it. She found that memories often confused the fine details, but whenever they were this fresh and vivid, they captured the spirit of the moment well enough.
A jumble of anatomy traipsed through the street. The Inside-Out Man was involuntarily revealing more of himself than anyone should. And he forced others to do the same. The effect seemed unconscious on his part, until Ken and Miranda arrived.
The Inside-Out Man ripped Ken apart, mixed him up, and smashed him back together. Alyssa now experienced it too. Even secondhand, it unnerved her. It didn’t hurt, not exactly. It affected her—and Ken—on an entirely different level. The Inside-Out Man injected a shot of pure nihilism directly into the bloodstream. Ken could no longer trust that he’d remain physically intact, nor could Miranda or anyone else caught in the Inside-Out Man’s wake. What did anything matter in the face of that?
Ken pulled his mask off, a direct response to seeing Alyssa recoil.
“I’m so sorry to show that to you,” he said.
“No, no. It’s okay. I’d rather see it.” She had tried to put a stop to madness like that months ago. She had betrayed her friends by teaming up with their enemy so they’d never have to experience something like this. Betrayed them for nothing.
“Well, I’m even sorrier to ask,” Ken said. “We can’t touch him … but maybe you can.”
Alyssa saw the image of the Inside-Out Man’s brain slithering across his skull. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s worth a shot.”
She also saw further information. The Inside-Out Man was Ollie Neal, a man Miranda failed to save. Lord knows she tried, though. Alyssa was not supposed to know about this. Something else Miranda neglected to mention to her. But Miranda had indeed gone above and beyond in trying to restore Ollie to human form after a lunatic had transformed him into a jigsaw puzzle. As Ultra Woman, Miranda had raced throughout the city to find all of Ollie. It took her nearly an hour, but at the speeds she was moving, it felt longer—felt like days of non-stop searching, no rest, entirely focused on putting this one man back together. After a while, Miranda wanted to collapse and give up, but she kept going until she was certain she had found all the remaining pieces.
And it wasn’t enough.
“Alyssa? Are you okay?”
All that effort, and Skyler died anyway, didn’t even want to be saved.
“Yeah, of course,” Alyssa said. “Take me there. But let’s make one quick stop on the way.”