or read part by part below

Part 1 – “That Voodoo You Do”
Part 2 – “Fridge Logic”
Part 3 – “Waking up in a Stranger’s Bed”
Part 4 – “What Happens in the Lower Vertebral Column, Stays in the Lower Vertebral Column”
Part 5 – “Running on Empty”
Part 6 – “Spectre of the Gun”
Part 7 – “On The Beach”

Also, please enjoy the following two Songs of the Chapter!

Faked his own death? Well, if he’d been alive not five minutes ago and threatening his former fiancée with a gun… Irene decided to stick with her last thought, that anything seemed possible. Almost against her will. Irene’s eyes started to flicker open.

“We knew he was up to something, but we hadn’t told anyone else. We weren’t sure who to trust – it seemed like he might have some help within the RCMP. Maybe it was a mistake, but we did our best. And John…”

Now, they had Irene’s attention. She propped herself up, with great effort, to a kneeling position and stared intently at the pair, both wearing dark black suits and sunglasses that gave them the look of Secret Service types. The woman was indeed holding a rifle, and if Irene found it odd that she was wearing men’s clothing, she said nothing about it.

The strange man winced slightly, involuntarily, at being seen. The woman  didn’t, though. To be sure, it would have been better if Irene hadn’t looked at them, and they certainly couldn’t stay around long enough for the real police to get here and see them, and start asking questions. But what harm did it do for Irene to know their faces? If they were lucky, if John lived and they could cover up everything that had happened tonight well enough, the Project would reassign them. For a partial failure like this, where John had been shot on their watch, they’d be lucky to get sent to Siberia. If John died, or if their cover-up was less than complete (in short, if partial failure turned to complete failure, full stop) they’d be dead. The Project would see to that. In either case, Irene would never see them again.

“We’ve already called an ambulance for John. He’ll be on his way to Port Manteau General by now. When you’re ready, you should go visit him.”

“I will.”

She said it with a surprising certainty, a surprise even to herself. But if these cops had called an ambulance already, it meant he wasn’t dead yet and there was still hope. That was more hope than she’d had before. So she’d go see him, and she’d go get her powers back from the strange old lady, and maybe if she was really lucky things would go back to normal, or as close as it ever got to normal in her life.

No, wait, she thought. Not normal. Stupendous. She would be stupendous again.

Page 1 | Page 2

Her knees gave out suddenly, buckling as if pressed down by a massive weight. She sprawled down onto the sand, tears streaming unbidden as she fell. She wasn’t sure if she was crying for Lewis, for John, or for her own loss of power and the identity crisis that came with it. Whether she was afraid or tired or betrayed, and in what proportions that drove the tears didn’t matter to her. After a moment of this, she heard hurried footsteps coming towards her, but was beyond caring.

“Irene!”

Someone was yelling from a little way off. She didn’t recognize his voice and wondered idly how he knew her name but still did nothing in response.

Another voice called out. So there were two of them; one man, one woman, neither known to her.

“You’re safe now, Irene. We’ve been following Lewis for a long time. We’re just sorry we didn’t get to him before he acted.”

By “acted”, she assumed the strange woman meant “tried to kill you, and perhaps did kill John”. She didn’t say so, though, still not wanting to deal with the world just at this moment. She could hear the two strangers whispering to each other, and at any time other than this frustrating day when she’d decided to give up her powers she’d have clearly made out everything they said – but for now it was all a muddle. She felt the need to be Stupendous again. She needed to revisit the strange old seeress and get her powers back. That thought was just a little seed of initiative, though, just starting to winds its way up through an unfathomable depth of the dark dense soil of despair. She stayed down.

“You don’t have to get up, but you should. It’s safe now.”

“Yeah, Lewis was working on his own, and we, uh, we took care of him.”

She knew that for sure. She couldn’t stop thinking of it, seeing the way a chunk of his head had exploded, smelling the iron-rich pool of blood around where he’d fallen, mixed with something more pungent (Irene was pretty sure he’d lost control of his bladder when he died). The horror of it was a primary contributor to her lack of desire to ever open her eyes again, let alone try to stand.

Page 1 | Page 2

“I… I don’t understand.”

The balance of emotion on Lewis’ face turned significantly from joy to anger, with Irene able to read that the anger specifically came from a sense of perceived betrayal.

“Don’t play dumb with me. You thought I was out of the picture, just like you and John planned… well, it looks like I ruined your happy ending. I just wanted you to know what was happening before I gave you what you deserved.”

From the look of resolution he now held, from the way his hands stopped their nervous twitching and his finger hovered right by the trigger, Lewis had a particularly destructive idea as to what she deserved. Without even thinking about it, Irene quickly went into a survival mode she knew well from years of battling great evils. Without her superpowers, though, her only chance would be to quickly and correctly guess what was going on, then use that knowledge to talk Lewis out of what he was planning.

In a second, which she thought might be all she had, she ran through the possibilities. This did seem to her to be the real Lewis, but she’d thought he was dead. Clearly the car accident he’d been in had left him out of touch – brain damaged, perhaps? that would explain his change in behaviour and why he didn’t straighten out his apparent demise – and now, having finally returned and seen his finacée with John, he’d drawn a deranged conclusion that they had plotted together to get rid of him? It didn’t explain why he’d brought the rifle with him in the first place, but it made enough sense to work with.

“Lewis, honey… I didn’t know. John just told me you were dead and… I didn’t know what to think.”

That was true enough, and if he wanted to take another meaning from it, get confused, and keep her alive a bit longer, that was all to the good.

What was even better was that it worked. Lewis showed just a bit of hesitation, willingness, even desire to believe that she couldn’t be a part of it. Irene was never much of a liar, but since she really hadn’t been a part of whatever crazy scheme Lewis thought was going on, it was easy to keep him going as she effectively begged for her life and played for time to think.

And so on it went, she saying whatever she thought he’d want to hear, until she stopped agog in mid-sentence, watching for the second time that night as a man she’d loved was shot from a distance, gaping as a chunk at the back of Lewis’ head suddenly exploded into a pulpy red ruin.

Page 1 | Page 2

Sometimes, a rock trips a running woman. A small rock, smoothed out from the flows of the tide, barely noticeable in the dark against a backdrop of sand, sticking out just enough to catch tired shuffling feet. Sometimes, the hero doesn’t make a clean get away, and sometimes its because of an insignificant little rock.

Irene never saw what had felled her, she just knew that once she’d lost her balance a little bit she wasn’t going to keep it at all, going sprawling ass over teakettle, putting her arms out to effect a less than graceful roll in the sand in an attempt to pop back up to her feet and keep running. She’s too tired, though, and she only makes it halfway through before falling flat on her face, She scrambles, hands scraping desperately for a purchase in the soggy mud as she tries to get up as fast as her racked body will allow her. She’s just up to her knees when she hears Lewis.

“That’s enough. Get up slowly.”

If I could do anything but get up slowly, we wouldn’t be in this spot, thought Irene to herself. Still, not wanting to antagonize a homicidal maniac with a gun, she moves as slowly as possible while getting to her feet, hands high above her to show no provocative intent.

“That’s good. Now turn around. No funny business either.”

Irene couldn’t shake the thought that the voice of the gunman chasing her was somehow familiar, but her mind simply refused to place it. For whatever reason, now that she was about to turn and see him, her curiosity about it was higher than ever before – perhaps because she no longer had to occupy her mind with the act of will of continuing to run, perhaps because someone is often most concerned with a surprise right before they know it will be revealed. But nothing prepared her for what she saw when she got spun around to face her assailant. She wanted to shout out his name, in surprise and incomprehension, but tired and confused as she was, the words, the name of the dead man she had once loved and meant to spend the rest of her life with, simply wouldn’t form for her.

But there he was, holding a rifle, a terrifying grin of murderous joy spread across his face, distorted by a clear venom directed straight at her. It was like the face of a man who, having bit into an unexpectedly sour piece of fruit, had insanely decided to track down the grower and was lost in fantasy of revenge.

“Bet you thought you’d seen the end of me, huh bitch? No more Lewis, and you and John could just go on, right?”

Page 1 | Page 2

Damned if she couldn’t run. He’d been sure she would have dropped by now when he started the chase.

The shot on John had gone perfectly. Though he’d had gory fantasies of how the killing would look, John’s smug face turned into a gory pulp in an instant, he was proud to have stuck to what he’d always planned and trained to do. Aim for the central mass, remain calm, take your time, fire accurately. This, he had read, was the key – if you were going to shoot someone the most important thing to do was to ensure you hit them, then worry about whether the shot had killed them or just incapacitated them. And the best way to make sure you hit was to aim for the biggest and most central target – the torso. TV shows and movies spread a lot of myths about shooting at people, but all his research had said the same thing – make sure you hit what you aim at first and foremost.

The problem was, he’d expected to only have to make one kill. In his mind, as he’d seen it play out a thousand times, he’d shoot John, incapacitate or kill him (it didn’t matter at first), run down to Irene to explain all that had happened. After the shock wore off she’d be thrilled to see him – she could help him finish off John and get rid of his body, if that needed doing – and then they’d run away together, just get in the car and never look back. So when it turned out she was complicit, that he had to kill her too… she’d been right there, hovering over John, making an excellent target. He hadn’t been preparing for months, though, hadn’t seen the shot over and over in his mind’s eye.

So he’d hesitated. His finger hovered around the trigger, but couldn’t press it, not until she got up and started to run. Then, shook into hasty action, he’d managed to fire off one desultory and inaccurate shot, doing nothing more than kicking up some sand not particularly close to her. She was too fast, he wasn’t set…

…and there was nothing left to do but give chase. It would come down, Lewis figured, to whoever lost the will to run first. If he thought it was going to be him he’d drop to one knee, steady himself as much as he could, and fire one last shot at a rapidly departing Irene before he doubled back to where he’d parked and beat as hasty an exit as possible. But if it was her that stopped, or stumbled, or gave up first, then he would have the terrible vengeance which was his due.

Page 1 | Page 2

The muscles in her legs felt like they were on fire, the lactic acid burning away at the fibres that kept her going. Her feet throbbed with a singular demand to rest – she had not worn running shoes, not expecting to be chased by a homicidal maniac – and every step included a painful reminder of her sadly deficient choice in footwear.

Her back – oh, how her lower back ached! (It was, she thought without wanting to, better than the condition of John’s back, the pain she felt contrasting markedly to his inability to feel much of anything in his extremities.) Over the years she’d been thrown into walls, dropped from great heights, shot at, clubbed with all manner of blunt instruments, driven to the ground, punched, kicked, hurled, slammed, suffered all the different types of attack and bodily indignity possible that one who made a life of fighting could expect. In spite of all that experience, she couldn’t remember a time when her back hurt as much as it did now.

That was the worst pain, of course, the loss of self that her depowering had brought on. She’d taken for granted the way her hyper-capability made her feel, that in a dangerous situation she’d always be able to put others’ safety ahead of her own, that she’d know what to do or at least feel confident that she could figure it out. Watching John get shot, and knowing all she could do was try to save herself felt almost as painful as the fact that – for the first time ever- her body was failing her when she needed it most.

One thing was certain. If she could get out of this alive, she was going back to the strange old woman to have her powers restored. After this, she couldn’t deny any longer that she’d ever be anything but Stupendous.

She could feel herself hunching over, her breath shallow and near useless as she shuffled more than ran. This wouldn’t do. Even with her now diminished ears, she could hear the gunman’s footfalls in the sand some distance behind her.

Straightening up as much as she could, she lengthened her stride. She didn’t need to run forever – just longer than he did.

Page 1 | Page 2

John nods solemnly, but inside he is all smiles at how this is going.

“I guess it took losing Lewis for me to realize how much the people who are still around me matter. And in thinking about that, it just struck me that…”

Without warning, in the middle of her sentence, Irene had noticed John toppling over to fall awkwardly in the sand. She trails off, not believing her eyes at first. She hadn’t seen or heard anything to suggest what would have so toppled him, or why he showed no signs of getting back up, and that worried her. For all her life, she heard things before they happened, was more aware of her surroundings than anyone else, and not having that ability was disorienting when something inexplicable happened. So she stood shocked next to John, watching mutely as he stayed on his side in the sand, wondering why he’d fallen, why he didn’t get up, why the back of his sweater was soaking up an ever-growing stain of darkest crimson and…

oh God oh God oh God he’s been shot.

While Irene kneels over him, asking if he’s okay, panicked and trying to figure out what to do in a world just as dangerous as before (but one in which she suddenly feels wholly incapable and naked), John’s mind is racing a million miles a minute.

She hadn’t heard the shooter. That said very bad things either about his capabilities, or hers, or both. Something was wrong. His life or death was mostly out of his hands at this point, depending on how quickly his bodyguards could get to him and, then, on the doctors’ intervention. Her life, however, and her death – that was very much up in the air. Since all of his plans depended rather obviously on still being alive, and hell, perhaps even because some little residual slice of humanity and genuine affection resided in him, he realized the best thing to do was to convince her of what, in her heart, she must already know needed doing. With all the will he had left, he began to shout a single word, a directive – no, an imperative – at her.

“Run.”

“Run!”

“RUN!”

Page 1 | Page 2

Irene doesn’t look at John, not needing to in order to figure out what his complaint would be, in fact sharing it herself.

“But you’re cold.”

Just at that moment, John shivers involuntarily, his body helping make his point.

“I’m cold, and it’s windy, and as much as I do enjoy just sitting with you, we’re also quite adept at doing that indoors. Now, you wouldn’t have brought me here if you didn’t have big news…”

“What are you, some kind of detective?”

Irene was kidding, of course, everything told him that, but he still hated to be called on his ability to read people. As he often did, he felt in the moment the best way to deal with it without showing any undue emotion was to shout back as if the whole thing were a joke.

“Nah, I’m a spy. Learned how to figure out all your secrets in spy school.”

Irene smiled at him. She’d always enjoyed the game as much as he did.

“Did they teach you any patience in spy school?”

“Yeah, but I’m secretly taping you with a recorder in my shoe. It’s only got 20 minutes left on it, so I need you to get to the point.”

Irene forms her mouth into a circle in a mockery of being impressed, while John wiggles a single foot in front of himself to “catch” what she’d say next.

“Ooh, a recorder in the shoe? Pretty high-tech setup you’ve got there, Mr. Spy. Very Maxwell Smart-ish.”

It is now John’s turn for an exaggerated expression, one of a man taking a feigned but still grievous wound.

“Maxwell Smart? Give me a little more credit than that. And besides…”

Here, John grins impishly.

“…who says I’m one of the good guy spies?”

Irene almost claps her hands in amusement, trying not to laugh at the thought of John as a dangerous villain. For his part, he strikes as comical a self-assured villainous pose as possible to egg on her teasing reaction.

“Mister Dangerous, huh? You know, I’m not sure that really look really suits you. I think I like the real John better, the harmless John.”

John interjects quickly, though far from angrily.

“Mostly harmless.”

“Sure, mostly harmless.”

John could afford to be silly because, if his guesses were right, everything was going swimmingly well. What big news would be so important as to bring him out here to discuss other than she wanted the two of them to move in together? And if that was the case, it meant the coming to fruition of the next part of his plan, significantly ahead of schedule at that. Anything that deepened her emotional dependence on him, that increased his access to her, and to all the massive power she held, was all to the good.

Page 1 | Page 2

What this meant in the present was that he could thoroughly inhabit the life of the man who’d abducted him. Lewis rightly guessed that, as a contract killer, he’d be reticent around the neighbours, most of whom would likely have no idea and little care about who lived near them. He also had a fattened bank account, thanks to a recent payment from John, and Lewis was able with just a little bit of sang-froid to bluff his way through a phone call with the bank, have a new debit card sent, and just use that (with a new password he had set) for all purchases, setting up all monthly bills to be paid directly out of the account as well.

Still, he was careful. He went out only at night, and only when he absolutely needed to buy groceries. Irene’s parents lived in neighbouring Kentville, and though they were the only people around who’d recognize him, he didn’t want to risk being discovered – not that he didn’t trust them, but he was worried about word getting back to John. Instead, he used his time as productively as possible, finding out what he could about what was going on back in Port Manteau, obsessively planning and replanning his revenge on John. He’d need a gun, of course, so for that he took the killer’s car to Halifax, where he also joined a shooting club so he could practice. He had time, after all, and he needed to be perfect in the execution of this. His only advantage over John was that the bastard didn’t know he was still alive, and as long as he stayed careful that would remain the case. So he devoted his life to preparation, his time spent only on making sure everything was in order to get the drop on John, to kill him without anyone ever knowing who did it, and then to swoop in on Irene by surprise, to carry her off with him to the life they had always been meant to have together.

That she would react to such a shocking return in any way but positively never entered his mind. The hired gun had, for his own reasons, blanched at killing Lewis, but he had achieved an unintended aim in killing the poor man’s sanity, both through the shock of the situation and the psychotic side effects of the drug he’d used to keep Lewis under all those days. Of course, he had intended to drop the dosage slowly when and if he needed to wake Lewis, as was necessary if he wanted him to be healthy – but he was dead, and no one else ever knew he was there. So left in the wake of all that went unsaid was a man with nothing to lose, an obsessed, insane, homicidal man driven only to gain revenge and reclaim the great love of his life.

Page 1 | Page 2