Author’s Note

Hi Everybody!

Here’s the second chapter of the three-part miniseries for Sprint and Blackthorn, Transplant!

Expect the third chapter sometime tomorrow! Thanks for reading!

-Tyler

…Meanwhile, in Dimension 8109…

Organ music blared as the warm sun shone cheerfully down on the church in spite of the doldrum frowns and sorrow from the congregation in the cold church. Withering smells of incense and flowers wafted over the somber crowd, denoting death’s ubiquitous wandering glare. People had their heads bowed, staring gravely at their feet, while others dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs. Rays of light, tinted by the stained-glass, painted the pews and the floor in muted colors as the Canadian flag-draped coffin was gently carried out by the pallbearers.

Trent Pruitt, with his hands folded in front of him, stood in the rear-most pew. An emotionless mask hanging over his helmetless face, his blue eyes watched the coffin pass him as it was carried through the ten-foot arch doorway out toward the waiting hearse.

“This is your fault, by the way,” a church missal sitting in a pocket on the back of the adjacent pew accused. Pruitt scratched underneath the brim of the black beanie hat he wore.  

“…Hrmm,” he huffed.

“If Blackthorn hadn’t called you, would you have even noticed?” The missal reprimanded. “Maybe Officer Browning would still be alive if you hadn’t been preoccupied.” Pruitt slumped his shoulders.

“…I know,” headmitted in a whispered tone.

“Isn’t your uncle a cop?” The missal continued. “What would you do if he became Tumultus’s next victim? How would you explain it? How would you justify it?”

“I wouldn’t,” Pruitt insisted, looking over his shoulder as the coffin was gingerly loaded into the back of the hearse. People began collecting their belongings before lethargically strolling to the exit.

“Really?” The missal argued. Pruitt leaned forward on the back crest of the pew in front of him, stooping his head in the process.

“Leave the poor kid alone, Marc,” a music sheet interjected. “None of this is his fault.”

“When you take responsibility for defending the city from its criminality with your superpowers and your suit,” Marc protested. “I would argue it is. You can’t enjoy the fame while ignoring any accountability. You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”

“I wear the suit to protect myself! The friction alone would…” Pruitt seethed under his breath, stopping himself as he noticed some passing parishioners giving him a suspicious side eye. “Would you rather me do nothing?”  

“I’d rather you live a normal life, yes,” Marc clarified. “Leave Tumultus or any other supervillain, for that matter, to the adults with the authority to do something about it.”

“They don’t have the superpowers it would take to match what Salem can do,” Pruitt reasoned while the remainder of the church cleared out. “And I’m not about to leave Blackthorn high and dry.”

“Then I would suggest you find a better way of dealing with your enemies,” Marc advised. “…Unless you want to attend more funerals?” Pruitt scoffed, picking his head up and making his way out of the church after grabbing his backpack.

“Stop sprintingaway from your problems!” Marc called out after the speedster.

“Shut up, jerk,” Pruitt muttered, slinking his knapsack over his shoulders and opting to follow a winding path through a small park next to the single-spired church while the congregation began dispersing to the local cemetery. He fell into deep thought, paying no mind to the pretzel stand and the few bicyclists he passed along the way. The speedster simply shook his head as he mulled over Marc’s words.

“It’s a book, Trent, for crying out loud,” Pruitt vented to himself. “Why are you letting it get into your head!”  He took a long, deep breath as he arrived at an intersection on the other side of the park.

“Psst,” a voice urgently whispered. Catching Pruitt off guard, the speedster swiveled his neck to see where the voice had originated from. “No, no, over here! The hospital!”

“Wh…” Pruitt stammered, scanning pedestrians on the sidewalk across the street. Just beyond the surge of people was a massive hospital complex. “…Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

“A.I.leen is inside,” the hospital desperately warned. “She’s trying to steal a heart from the O.R.”

“…Because she’s trying to build her own body,” Pruitt surmised in an exasperated fashion, glancing suspiciously left and right. No one seemed to have noticed the speedster having a conversation with a building. “Where’s the O.R.?”

“West side, fourth floor,” the hospital advised. “Please, hurry!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pruitt sighed, waiting for the crosswalk to clear before jogging over the pavement and ducking down an unoccupied alleyway. He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed a number.

“Sprint?” June Fiddler answered the phone.

“St. Lyle’s,” Pruitt advised. “I think A.I.leen is trying to build a body.”

“Build a body?” Fiddler repeated quizzically.

“She’s harvesting organs,” Pruitt clarified. “…The, the hospital told me.”

“Ok,” Fiddler acknowledged. “Hang tight, I’ll—” An ear-splitting fire alarm accosted the street and cut off the conversation.

“There’s no time,” Pruitt warned, leaning past the edge of the alley to watch a stream of people anxiously leaving the emergency room lobby. Pressing his phone into his shoulder, he dropped his backpack on the ground and unzipped it, revealing his grey racing helmet. “Just get here as fast as you can—I’ll hold her off.”

…

A bomb disposal robot treaded down the sterile, brightly lit corridor of the hospital as the alarms continued to sing. With a circular camera wired onto a metal arm atop the machine and a submachine gun mounted to its side, two pincers extended forward while a third arm operated a spinning saw. Hospital staff scrambled from the hallway as the robot rolled toward the operating room with a metallic whirling noise. Turning the corner, the camera along the arm pivoted and zoomed in on a sign hanging from the ceiling above a door at the end of the hallway:

>Elevators

>Inpatient Pharmacy

>Endoscopy

<Laboratory

<X-Ray and MRI

<Operating Room

The robot paused for a moment as it processed the directory’s information. Switching the camera’s filter to infrared, it noted a few heat signatures toward the left side of the hospital, behind the door where the operating room sat. Resuming its journey down the corridor, the machine abruptly stopped as something breezed by.

“You know, stealing a bomb defuser drone is no easy feat,”  Pruitt commented from beneath his racing helmet. Using his super speed, he had strolled past the robot, deciding to lean up against the far wall near the door. “For a piece of malware.”

“Negative. My classification is Application Software—Artificial Intelligence. I am not malware,” a speaker on the robot corrected with a dull, automated voice.

“I’m making fun of you, A.I.leen,” Pruitt grumbled.

“I see,” A.I.leen replied. “Your attempts at humor have been proven ineffective.”

“…Yeah,” Pruitt huffed. “Ok, turn that thing around and return it to where you found it, and then leave.”

“I cannot do that, Sprint,” A.I.leen asserted sternly.

“I know you’re here for the organs, but I can’t let you steal them,” Pruitt insisted. “There are people here who need them.”

“Their chances of surviving the transplant are 91.8 percent, yes, but they will never be fully optimized,” A.I.leen argued. “The organs will far exceed expectations with my concepts.”

“Sure,” Pruitt responded. “You build yourself a body. Then what?”

“Negative,” A.I.leen corrected. “I do not want to ‘build myself a body.’ I want to perfect humanity.”

“…Of course you do,” Pruitt mumbled to himself. “‘Perfect’ humanity by turning us all into robots?”

“Affirmative,” A.I.leen confirmed. “Synthesizing organs with hardware will allow them to be 98.4 percent more effective and will discontinue their expiration in two cycles. Melding brain cells with technology and transferring them to software will further prolong human life.”

“I highly, highly doubt you’d get anyone to go along with that,” Pruitt countered. “Medical advancements are one thing, what you’re suggesting is…”

“Evolution?” A.I.leen suggested, sensing the speedster’s loss of words.

“Crazy,” Pruitt decidedly rebuked.  

“It is no more crazy than your faulty programming allowing you to talk to inanimate objects,” A.I.leen objected.

“She has a point, you know,” the wall next to Pruitt interjected.

“No, she doesn’t,” the speedster snapped.

“Just saying…” the wall continued. “The cancer is really messing with you.”

“Shut up,” Pruitt seethed.

“You are malfunctioning again,” A.I.leen noted.

“It’s not a malfunction—it’s a condition,” Pruitt corrected. “Side effect.”

“They are all one in the same,” A.I.leen advised. “Which is why if you won’t let me help you, I must do what is necessary.” The bomb disposal robot shifted on its treads, swinging the submachine gun toward the speedster and opening fire.

“Dah!” Pruitt stammered, ducking out of the first bullet’s trajectory before lunging to the opposite side of the hallway with his superspeed. Maintaining his velocity, he sprinted sideways up the wall before transitioning onto the ceiling’s surface. Completing the loop around the corridor, Pruitt landed on the floor with a skip and dashed directly at A.I.leen. In the blink of an eye, the speedster had dismantled the processing unit of the disposal drone. Coming to a skidding stop a few yards down the hall, Pruitt turned to watch the robot lose power.

Pruitt exhaled slowly as the alarms continued to pulse. He began walking down the corridor.

“You’re just going to leave that there?” the wall asked, looming over the bomb defusal drone.

“The police will take care of it,” Pruitt explained, tossing the processing unit aside. “I’m pretty sure it’s there’s anyway.”

“I’m here,” Fiddler radioed to Pruitt. “Where are you?”

“Over by the O.R.,” Pruitt answered. “She hijacked one of those bomb defuser robots—I took care of it!” The PA system above the speedster’s head crackled to life.

“You really think that was the end? Didn’t you?” A.I.leen taunted her foe. “You perceived I was defeated?” Pruitt slumped his head forward.

“…Or not,” he sighed.

“In the stairwell, on my way up,” Fiddler advised.

“Your cancer, your speed, and your ability to talk to inanimate objects aren’t the only things your asbestos exposure has inflicted you with; it seems to have also warped your understanding of perception.” A.I.leen continued. “Either that, or you’re just as arrogant as you look.” The alarms gave the hospital a full-throated warning as the conversation became silent.   

“You…,” Fiddler finally stuttered. “Y-you have cancer?”

“Just get up here,” Pruitt ordered. “We need to draw her out.”

“You will do no such thing,” A.I.leen sneered ominously. A series of soft clicks echoed down the hall as the stairwell doors of the hospital floor locked. The speedster glanced around with trepidation. Turning this way and that, he noticed some faint wisps of smoke emanating from electrical outlets along the walls.

“Ahh, great,” Pruitt muttered. “Thorns, you’ve got to evacuate whoever’s left—she’s overloading the outlets!”

“On it!” Fiddler acknowledged. The speedster made a beeline back toward the other end of the hallway as sparks erupted from the hospital’s outlets. Barreling through the door and blitzing through each and every room along his escape route, Pruitt checked for anyone remaining on the fourth floor.  He rounded another corner, sprinting across the sterile white tile and skipping along the walls as he maneuvered around the bolts of electricity that broke out of their sockets and coursed over the hallway. Rows of lights illuminating the corridor blinked frantically while the energy surge choked the hospital.

“Running will get you nowhere,” A.I.leen taunted over the PA speaker moments before Pruitt stormed into the operating room. Two doctors and two nurses stood around an operating table holding a young boy under anesthesia. All of the electrical equipment had been unplugged by the hospital staff while they carried out the surgery with headlamps.

“Everyone out!” Pruitt ordered.

“We can’t,” one of the doctors rebuffed. “We’re in the middle of a heart transplant.”

“The floor is about to erupt in flames!” Pruitt insisted.

“And if we move, especially at the speeds you’re capable of, we risk both the patient and his new heart,” the other doctor snapped, remaining focused on the operation. “We’re safer staying put.”

“Doc, that may not be an option!” Pruitt protested.

“It’s going to have to be!” the doctor spoke in a steady tone.

“Suffice to say, Sprint,” A.I.leen mused. “Any attempt to escape will be futile. Your chances of defeat stand at 97.9 percent.”

“…Not yet,” Pruitt grumbled, dashing from the operating room in time to watch as bolts of electricity singed and ultimately ignited the walls of the corridor. A palpable heat engulfed the hallway as crackling flames crawled forward. “Crud! Thorns!”

“First and second floors are evacuated!” Fiddler responded over the radio while the fire crawled over the hallway. “T.F.S. and I are getting people on the third floor out as we speak!”

“I need help! She started a fire! There’s a surgery going on up here, and they can’t move without risking anything,” Pruitt frantically explained.

“On my way,” Fiddler responded.

“…What do I do, what do I do…” Pruitt thought to himself. The speedster resorted to completing laps up and down the corridor, maintaining a high velocity of air displacement in a vain attempt to curtail the fire.

“You’re only making it worse!” The wall screamed in agony. Pruitt gritted his teeth beneath his helmet.

“That’s the plan!” he snapped.

“That’s going to kill you!” the wall argued. Moments later, the sprinkler system caught a whiff of the smoke and doused the hallway with a sudden deluge of water.

“AHHH!” screamed Pruitt as he became electrocuted. He slumped to the floor, convulsing uncontrollably.

“Sprint?” Fiddler urgently called out before seemingly turning to someone else. “Is the power to the hospital cut off?”

“Not yet, Blackthorn,” Pruitt could hear a voice reply.

“Do it now!” Fiddler ordered as the fire diminished. “A.I.leen’s going to burn the whole place down!”

“Grrrh!” Pruitt cried through clenched teeth.

“I will never be able to process human behavior, Sprint,” A.I.leen admitted over the PA system while the fire became extinguished. “But that is expected, and today is only a setback I have calculated for. You and Blackthorn have only delayed the perfection of humanity. I will amend what remains broken, and—” The lights to the hospital were abruptly shut off, and the electricity sparking from the outlets faded. Pruitt shivered, and his fingers trembled as he closed his eyes and rested his head on the wet floor.

“Wow,” the nearest wall remarked. “That was stupid. I can’t believe you’re still alive.”

“Is the kid in surgery ok?” Pruitt asked between breaths. They felt as sharp as glass shards.

“Yeah, your stunt kept the fire from causing any real harm,” the wall answered. “All of this for a heart?”

“I tuned out the villain’s motives a while back,” Pruitt admitted with a tired voice. “Things stopped making sense the moment I realized I could talk to you.” The speedster climbed to his feet on shaky legs, using the wall as a crutch as he limped his way toward the exit.

“You sure you should be doing that?” The wall questioned.

“I have accelerated healing,” Pruitt dismissively reasoned with a painful cough. He hobbled down the corridor, fazed through the stairwell door, and hobbled down the stairs—passing some firefighters along the way.

“Do you need help?” One of the responders asked.

“Nah, I’ll walk it off. Thanks for stopping the power, though,” Pruitt weakly nodded.

“Sure,” the firefighter replied uncertainly as Sprint continued his descent to the first floor. Avoiding the throngs of first responders swarming the lower levels of the hospital, Pruitt kept his head down and casually strolled out of a side door onto the sidewalk in front of an ambulance. Fiddler, hiding behind her suit, leaned up against the vehicle with her arms crossed.

“Are you ok?” Blackthorn asked.

“Yeah, bad day at work,” Pruitt joked. Blackthorn closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the ambulance.

“Sprint,” Fiddler rebuked. “You were electrocuted. You could have died.”

“What other choice did I have?” Pruitt asked woefully. “How do we even fight an A.I. convinced that humanity needs to be perfected?”

“Oh, I don’t know?” Fiddler suggested. “Together?”

“Yeah, well…” Pruitt rasped, slumping his shoulders as he put more thought into his answer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was a viable option at the time.”

“…Ok,” Fiddler nodded. “The police are going to have some questions.”

“I did everything I could against what’s basically a computer virus,” Pruitt reasoned. “You can’t punch your way out of everything.” Fiddler bit her lip in deep thought.

“We need a plan for next time,” she strategized.

“Yeah, I’ll get on that,” Pruitt chuckled, turning to walk away. “See ya tomorrow.” A shadowy hand reached out and grabbed Pruitt by the forearm, stopping him from leaving.

“You forgetting something?” Fiddler rhetorically asked.

“Err…no?” Pruitt answered.

“The elephant in the room?” Fiddler clarified.

“What elephant?” Pruitt questioned. Blackthorn rolled her eyes with little patience.

“You have cancer?” She sternly exclaimed. The speedster tilted his head down to the floor.

“I didn’t tell you because I thought it wasn’t important,” Pruitt reasoned.

“…Not important!?” Fiddler repeated incredulously. “I don’t believe this!”

“Where I grew up had led pipes and asbestos all over the place,” Pruitt asserted. “It’s, it’s the source of both my powers and the cancer.”

“So?” Fiddler argued.

“So, everyone I know at school—in my personal life, has treated me…differently since it started,” Pruitt explained. “…It doesn’t matter what you try to do to show people who you are; they’ll still only see you as a cancer patient. You still feel helpless.” The argument quieted as sirens and horns trumpeted around the corner.

“I knew I had to do something when I got these powers. I knew I couldn’t just sit back and watch Salem,  A.I.leen, or Zane, or anyone else beat the city,” Pruitt continued. “…But in a sad kind of way, this and you are an escapism for me. I can forget about the cancer and just…make a difference, participate in society. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.” Fiddler wiped her forehead, staring up at the tops of the nearby buildings.

“All the times I chewed you out about not picking up the phone,” she pondered aloud. “You were getting chemo, weren’t you?”

“…Not every time,” Pruitt admitted. An agonizing smile creased Blackthorn’s lips.

“I’m sorry,” Fiddler apologized.

“No, see,” Pruitt argued. “That’s what I’m worried about—you seeing me differently. Just like everybody else.” Fiddler pursed her lips, listening to the ambient sounds of the city for a long minute.

“…Ok,” she quavered. “When’s your next appointment?”

“Do you want to know that so you know when not to contact me?” Pruitt surmised.

“Well, I don’t want to have to protect the city by myself,” Fiddler morbidly advised. “If that means you have to sit one out while you get your treatment, so be it.”

“No, I—” Pruitt started.

“We let each other know when we have a vacation upcoming so we can plan ahead,” Fiddler interrupted. “This is no different.”

“Sure, but,” Pruitt countered. “I’m going to be in town. If Salem or somebody else breaks out of prison again, I think it would be kind of stupid for you to go at it alone!”

“And if that does happen, I will call you,” Fiddler soberly assuaged. “But in the meantime, you’re priority should be remission.” Pruitt hesitated, taking a breath.

“Tomorrow at ten,” the speedster revealed. “Should take a couple of hours.”

“All right,” Fiddler nodded. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Just don’t be waiting out front when I get there,” Pruitt jovially warned. “I’ll pretend I don’t know you.”

“No offense, but I’ve got better things to do with my time,” Fiddler retorted, prompting a chuckle from the speedster.

“See ya tomorrow,” Pruitt concluded with a mock salute. Fiddler waved moments before Pruitt took off down the hectic street with his superspeed.

Photo by Graham Ruttan on Unsplash