WebNovels

Chapter 18 - Chapter 18

The forest was quiet. The sun was still just beginning to rise. The forest floor was a mix of yellows and red. The sunlight that reached it was a soft orange. 

The sharp inclines and uneven ground would've troubled most runners. The issue was non-existent for Alex. He ran unhurriedly through the winding trails. A slight red flush to his cheeks created the illusion that he was exerting himself significantly. He wasn't expecting to encounter anyone on the trails. Not at such an early hour on a saturday morning. 

The bruises from the battle between him and Clark had healed. He hadn't attended the scheme since then. Dr Molay had arranged a meeting to bring up the idea of withdrawing to him. She hadn't expected him to agree as easily as he did. It had been a month since then. 

Alex was happy to withdraw from the scheme. He could've kept going, using his physique at the peak of what an ordinary person could achieve, to hold his own. The benefits to doing so were non-existent. Dr Molay had offered an alternative which he readily agreed to. 

Twice a week he now attended training sessions with the U.S military. The recruits he worked alongside were ordinary people. A commanding officer taught them marksmanship, tactics and hand-to-hand combat. The hand-to-hand combat lessons had indirectly improved his boxing as well. 

The gaps in his schedule had been almost entirely filled. An ordinary person might've struggled to juggle everything, but Alex had no problems. The modifications he was making were steadily elevating him towards a higher level of life. He only needed a few hours of sleep to feel re-energised. 

The clifface he'd visited with Taylor a month ago appeared in the edge of his view. He smiled and sped up. He'd encountered a few hikers admiring the view of the city from the same spot in the past. He preferred to have the view to himself. He was happy not to spot the backs of anyone else. 

The branches parted and he emerged out onto the cliff. The view lacked the twinkling city lights of nightime, but the sun rising on the horizon created a different kind of beauty. 

'That never gets old.' He thought to himself. He sat down on the edge of the cliff and admired the dazzling orange glow. 

Something strange caught his eye. The waterfall beneath the cliff gushed and gurgled as it always did. An odd colour that hadn't been there a few days ago demanded his attention. He looked closer. His perception of time began to flow faster. The images his eyes were capturing became sharper. The flowing water no longer made the object appear blurry and he saw it more clearly. 

"A backpack?" He whispered to himself. 

The dots immediately connected in his mind. He shot to his feet. One of the backpack's straps was caught on an irregularly-shaped rock on the way-down. This prevented it from flowing downstream with the rushing water. 

The backpack was soaked. The weighed-down fabric made the outlines of the objects inside more defined. He could clearly see the shape of a water-bottle and what looked likely to be a first aid kit. No sane person would throw a perfectly good backpack off the side of a cliff. 

Alex scanned the cliff's edge. The descent was too steep for him to climb down. It wouldn't matter if he accelerated his speed or not. The rock was smooth. There were no handholds for him to grip. 

He stared at the waterfall. Then he turned around and dashed back down the way he'd came. He wasn't willing to risk smashing his head on a rock just to reach someone who was currently only an idea in his imagination. He could simply be being paranoid.

Perhaps the hiker had placed their backpack to close the cliff edge and it had tumbled over the side. There were dozens of reasons why the backpack could've ended up hanging on the cliff face. He hoped that it really was just his paranoia. 

Alex sprinted down the trail. He was travelling at a speed of nearly seventy miles an hour. A car on the highway wouldn't be doing much faster than that. A human life could potentially be at risk. He didn't think of himself as a hero, but if it was within his abilities, he felt the obligation to do what he could to help others in an emergency. 

He prayed that he was alone on the trails. He didn't want to expose his powers so early, he'd hoped to fly under the GDA's radar for at least a couple more years. 

Alex's heart thudded in his chest. He gritted his teeth. He didn't want his powers to wipe away his humanity. If he wanted to hold onto the values he cared about, then sometimes, certain risks needed to be taken. 

The redwood trees zipped past him. He was practically flying across the ground. The trail curved right, but he disregarded it and dashed deeper into the forest. He knew where the base of the waterfall was, he'd seen it from above. 

Branches slapped against his skin. The speed he was travelling it at made everything he touched dangerous. The branches opened cuts on his face and hands. The injuries healed just as quickly as they appeared. 

It had been less than a minute since he spotted the backpack, but it had felt like hours. He burst out of the trees and out onto the slippery damp ground. The waterfall gurgled and crashed into smooth rocks in front of him. 

"Shit." Alex swore loudly. 

A woman lay on the damp earth. Her face was pressed against the soil and her legs were partially submerged in the pool of the waterfall. The water lapped gently against her limbs. She wasn't breathing. 

He dropped to his knees and placed two fingers against her wrist. The skin was ice-cold. The temperature alone told him that he wasn't going to find a pulse. 

The woman's clothes were torn in numerous places. Her left leg was twisted at ugly and unnatural angle. Alex kneeled silently while his thoughts raced. He didn't try to turn her over, if she'd suffered a spinal injury then moving her would do far more harm than good. 

The woman wasn't breathing. She didn't have a pulse and her skin was ice-cold. Her condition was obvious. It was a corpse lying on the damp earth, not a person. Her muscles had already begun to contract in rigor mortis. 

Alex was a first year medical student. He'd been taught how to assess patients and how to identify vital signs. Any random person off the street could see that the woman was dead. There was no way he would've missed such clear indications. 

It didn't make any sense that he was thinking about spinal injuries. It didn't matter that rolling her could worsen her injuries, she was already deceased. The woman was dead, Alex knew this. A doctor's role in this situation was to pronounce the time of death and notify the family. Alex wasn't a doctor, not yet, and they weren't in a hospital. 

He'd tried to use his powers on small animals. It hadn't been difficult to capture a few mice and birds. The small creatures he'd captured were now buried in shallow graves in the forest. Out of the hundred or so test subjects he'd experimented on, only the last dozen had survived. 

The experiments had been bloody. Most of the creatures died bleeding from their eyes and ears. Haemorrhages and organ death were common. Alex didn't feel any guilt for the animals he'd killed. Their deaths had been necessary to inform his understanding of his powers. 

The experiments had taught him several important lessons. The creatures that had died the most violent deaths, had suffered most severely because he'd attempted to make modifications to their anatomy. Other living things weren't like him, their bodies instinctively rejected any external alterations and rapid cell death started to take place.

He'd tried futilely to make modifications to the paws of nearly thirty rabbits, before he realised the flaw in his thinking. It wasn't a lack of skill with his powers that was killing them. Ironically it was their own immune systems. 

In order to make modifications to the bodies of other living things, even minor inconsequential ones, he needed to be able to unilaterally halt the immune responses of trillions of cells. He couldn't even begin to guess how long it would take to acquire that kind of knowledge and control. 

After he'd stopped slaughtering rabbits for no reason, he'd shifted his focus to a different topic. Since external changes were killing his test subjects, he simply had to make the changes come from within. 

Viruses couldn't be treated with antibiotics, because they worked and reproduced inside host cells. Alex drew inspiration from this and attempted to take control of processes that were already naturally taking place inside the animals' bodies. It had still taken thirty more dead birds and rabbits to overcome the initial learning curve, but he ultimately arrived at a huge success. 

There were countless other complications he needed to consider. He could use his powers to magnify and accelerate the natural healing of a rabbit's broken foot, but the energy required for this had to come from somewhere. He'd succeeded in healing the first rabbit's foot. Unfortunately the process had sucked up every ounce of energy in the creature's body.

The protective mechanism his powers had when used on his own body, didn't exist in the bodies of other creatures. The rabbit's foot had been healed. That ended up being the only intact part of it's body. Its skin, muscles and organs were broken down to supply energy for the healing process. The rabbit's foot had thick healthy and glossy fur. The rest of its body was a brittle skeleton that shattered when it hit the ground. 

Alex took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and willed his powers to create a bridge between his hand and her's. The bridge's construction was slow. The patients he'd touched in the hospital had pulses and neural activity. The woman lying in the damp earth had neither. 

She was still in a state of rigor mortis. Alex knew that she couldn't have been dead for more than thirty-six hours. Her cells had begun to die. But they weren't all dead, not yet. 

The cells that were still alive were in bad condition. The bridge formed and he immediately knew that it had been thirty hours since she'd died. He wondered whether her family had filed a missing person's report yet. 

Without a blood supply, her brain cells had died within minutes. Her white blood cells, tendons and heart valves still remained biologically active. A handful of other tissues also still lived. 

He knew what he was considering. He was thinking about reversing death.

The brain could only survive three-four minutes without a blood supply. Medical professionals could use defribrillation to 'shock' the heart into beating after it had stopped. No amount of CPR or defribrillation could bring back someone who'd been dead for more than a few minutes. The woman had been dead for more than thirty hours. The best surgeons and doctors in the world could have suddenly rushed out of the bushes and they wouldn't have been able to do a thing. 

He was different. The woman was dead, but he could still try. He could try to bring her back. 

The decision was made. He willed his powers to work. Tendrils of flesh sprouted from his hand and squirmed towards the woman's wrist. They paused for a moment on her mottled skin. Then, they sank slowly into her flesh. 

The tendrils fed back huge quantities of information to Alex. A 3-d image of the woman's body was rapidly taking shape in his mind. He quickly identified what had killed her. The woman had been born with a congenital heart defect. The wall of her left ventricle was too thin. Either her doctors hadn't provided her with the relevant information, or they'd never picked up the defect. 

The wall to her left ventricle had ruptured. She'd been dead within minutes. Alex didn't know exactly what had happened, but he imagined that she'd lost consciousness and fallen over the edge of the cliff. The waterfall's currents had washed her to the shore. 

'You can do this.'

The tendrils spread like tree root's through the woman's body. They crept into her brain, heart and lungs. They also infilitrated into her circulatory system. Alex's jaw was clenched tightly. He had to concentrate. 

The crystalline sugary deposist in his body began to break down. The energy flowed through the tendrils and into the woman's body. The process of denying death began. 

The woman's heart began to surge with electrical activity. The ruptured ventricle squirmed and the flesh began to knit back together. Within a minute, it was as if the rupture had never happened. The repair process consumed massive quantities of energy. Without the hasty replenishment from the tendrils that snaked throughout her body, the energy demand would've devoured her fat stores in an instant and moved on to her muscles. 

The process was agonisingly intricate. Alex's heart hammered in his chest as he fought desperately to restore the woman's body. The toxins that had accumulated in her liver and blood tried constantly to destroy his efforts. He grit his teeth tighter and kept working. 

For an hour he sat kneeling beside her. His entire right arm was a pulsing mass of tendrils that wriggled about beneath the woman's skin. The energy he'd expended was unimaginable. His skin was unaturally pale and he'd lost more than twenty pounds of muscle mass. He hadn't had a choice. The crystalline energy stores were gone, but the repair demanded more. He could've stopped and given up. He didn't even consider the thought. 

The woman still lay in the damp earth. Her lips were cracked and covered in soil. Her left leg was still bent unnaturally. But her muscles were no longer in rigor mortis. The mottled colour to her skin had been transformed back to a healthy pinkish tone. 

Alex felt a wave of dizziness. He hadn't felt exhausted since his powers manifested. Now he reaquainted himself with the feeling. 

There was no connection between him and the woman. His heart was kind, but there was a selfish motivation behind saving her. He'd never experimented with his powers on another human. He'd listened to what patients' bodies had told him, but he'd never tried anything further. The woman lying in the damp earth was a test subject. If he could fix her, then he could fix his loved ones as well. 

'Come on!'

He called on his powers. His head throbbed painfully at the exertion. In the woman's chest, the cells that told her heart to beat began to tremble. Alex lost another few pounds of muscle mass as energy flowed to her heart. 

Ba-dum. 

The first heartbeat was like rain after a drought. The woman took a sharp ragged breath. She didn't wake. Alex kept her unconscious. His alien-looking right arm that had transformed into a mass of squirming fleshy tenctacles began to change. The tendrils gradually withdrew and his face regained some colour. 

He leaned back against the trunk of a red wood and took several deep breaths. When his head no longer throbbed like someone was striking a chisel against his skull, he pulled his phone out from his pocket. 

He dialed. The phone beeped and the call connected within a few seconds. 

An operator in an office thousands of miles away picked up the phone, "Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?" 

"I'm in the national forests near the university of Michigan. There's a woman, I think she's fallen. She's breathing, but she's not conscious. Her leg's broken, badly." 

The operator typed rapidly on her computer. The system quickly flagged up a missing persons report in that area for a young woman. 

"Stay where you are. Help is on its way." The operator said calmly. 

The urgent request was put through to a fire and rescue centre in central Michigan. Emergency responders in bright green uniforms rushed to the helicopter. The blades began to spin and the pilot switched on the navigation systems. The blades span faster and the helicopter rose shakily into the air. 

Half an hour later the helicopter flew over the forest. The towering redwoods bounced the distress signal about. After circling for a few minutes one of the responders spotted a man waving frantically to the chopper at the foot of a waterfall. 

The rescue team didn't speak. They knew their roles exactly. A rope shot out from the belly of the helicopter. A rectangular orange board with a dozen wide-padded straps was lowered with the rope. 

A member of the rescue team attached a rope to her waist and lowed herself off the side of the helicopter. The winch system whirred to life and she quickly began to descend.

The emergency responder's boots touched the floor and she immediately leaped into action.

"Roll her!" The responder yelled over the beating of the helicopter's blades. 

Alex nodded and immediately rolled the woman slightly onto her side. The emergency responder smoothly slid the stretcher underneath the woman. She skillfully tied the straps and loudly gave an instruction into the microphone in her ear. The rope connecting the helicopter to the stretcher stretched taught. The rope began to slowly pull upwards. The emergency responder was lifted higher as well. 

"Stay put! The rangers are on their way! You did an amazing thing today! They'll take you down to the station to get your statement!" The emergency responder yelled as she rose into the air. 

Over the roar of the helicopter's blades, Alex didn't hear the woman in the stretcher groan. Her eyes snapped open suddenly. The whirring blades drowned out her scream. 

"You're safe now! I'm with the fire and rescue team! We're taking you to the hospital for treatment!" The emergency responder grabbed the woman's hands and held them tightly to stop her from continuing to thrash about. Her frantic struggling posed a risk to the straps and buckles that held her. 

The woman blinked rapidly. Her eyes were as wide as saucers and she was hyperventilating. The panic and terror of being suspended in mid-air made her feel like her chest was going to explode. 

She suddenly froze. A memory came back to her. Her face was already pale, but now the colour drained from it entirely. 

"N-n-no! No, I-I-I fell! I-I died!" The woman screamed. 

The emergency responder had heard it hundreds of times before. She squeezed the woman's hands tighter and tried to make her voice sound as reassuring as possible, "You're not dead honey! You're going to be okay!" 

The woman felt the world suddenly start to spin. Her eyes bounced about in their sockets. Then her pupils rolled backwards. She'd been conscious for less than a minute before she fainted. 

The emergency responder checked her pulse. It was fast but steady. The woman had been through a lot, it wasn't a surprise that she'd fainted. The emergency responder helped her colleagues to lift the stretcher into the cabin. The pilot operated the controls and the helicopter turned back towards the city. The hospital had already been briefed and were waiting for their patient to arrive. The woman's family who had reported her missing were rushing to the hospital as well. 

On the forest floor Alex sat back down. The adrenaline rush that he'd been experiencing for essentially an hour and a half straight finally began to fade. He felt exhausted. 

'It's not a monster attack, but I guess I should tell mum and dad.' He thought to himself. 

The thought made him burst into laughter. He wasn't worried that the hospital would discover what he'd done. He hadn't fixed her broken leg or the dehydration, hunger and building fever from laying out in the wild for more than 24 hours. He'd also left alone the various scrapes and bruises from her trip down the waterfall. Everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. 

'This fucking forest.' 

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