I am a member of and very infrequent contributor to Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s website HitRecord, which is a collaborative community for people into music, writing, art etc. You provide ‘Records’ on the site, and literally anyone and everyone can ‘Remix’ them in any way they see fit or are inspired to do. The most successful ideas have gone on to become books and cartoons and music tracks where literally dozens of unconnected strangers have a hand in the creative process and everyone gets paid accordingly.
This is not the story of one such project.
However, it does represent the high water mark of my collaborations to the site. They run a Weekly Writing Challenge where you write to an outline, and in early May 2016 the prose prompt was: ‘Write an action scene where one character can teleport’. Although it’s not a competition, the best entries as judged by that month’s curator are compiled in a video. This challenge brought out some really good ideas from the community: I particularly liked the story of a teleporting boxer, and another about a man being tortured who discovers he can teleport.
On 11th May 2016, the top story for the challenge was mine.
The brief was really in my wheelhouse. Although I’ve not really touched on it here, I’m a geek of the old school and I’ve spent far too much time in my life contemplating the applications of superpowers in real life. Would super strength punches be rendered ridiculous by Newton’s third law? How do saccades disrupt heat vision? Would you be able to sleep if you were invisible and light passed through your eyelids?
You get the picture.
I thought it would be a welcome diversion to present it here. At a little under 3000 words it’s not the shortest short story (I will never be capable of flash fiction, I am brevity’s bitch), but I think it’s a decent second draft that could use a bit more polishing.
Quick note on the title. I submitted this against a deadline, hence why it’s only a second draft, and I went for the lazy habit of lifting a line from the story and making it the title. When I ‘won’ the challenge, my first thought was, “The fucking Talented Mr Ripley!” Cue much self-flagellation.
Anyway, please enjoy:
The Talented Mr Vol
The punishment seemed to come from everywhere. He sensed rather than saw a blow coming at his eyes. Tucked his chin and stepped back just enough to avoid being blinded. A harder follow-up sent a floating rib adrift. Barely time to grunt in pain. A sharp kick at the bottom of his hamstring. Not just a charley horse to worry about, it took his right knee to the floor.
Danny felt like he was being swarmed, but there was no sense of panic. He threw a wild back hand, trying to angle his fist upwards: he had no ambitions of landing the blow, but knew people were more inclined to step back if their teeth or nose were in jeopardy rather than their torso. As soon as he registered that he was swinging at empty air, he pushed as hard as he could with his left leg and tried to double the space he’d created. The charley horse refused to be ridden as he backed off, turning a simple step into an awkward, drunken stumble. He managed to turn two kicks away as he retreated, took an overhand punch on his already swelling left eye, blocked another and briefly, savagely thought ‘Finally’ as the little bastard got too close. He snaked a big hand around his opponent’s nape, used his own strength and deteriorating balance to yank him almost clear off his feet and planted his forehead on the bridge of the other man’s nose.
CRACK. The smaller man managed to push away, a roar escaping him and already muffled by the hand he was holding over his face. Danny felt the wall at his back, preventing him from falling from his feet entirely. The irony that he was now boxed into the blind alley in which he’d hoped to trap Arnett Vol was not lost on him.
* * * *
The set-up had been simple. His target’s details came through the usual digital dead-letter drop, and Danny Mur began his preparations the same day. At forty-five years old Danny was long in the tooth for this line of work, but he attributed his longevity – when he permitted himself to think on such things – to his careful nature. His peers and his employers didn’t share the same modest view. They simply said that Danny was as hard and as sharp as the rock Cain used to slay Abel.
Arnett Vol, twenty-four years old and with a name for himself as a man who could get into places others couldn’t. A handful of arrests and a smattering of outstanding warrants in most countries in mainland Europe, at least half of which were for escaping from various prisons. It appeared that he was just as adept at getting out as he was at getting in.
The rest of the files about Vol he skimmed for what was operationally relevant, but outside of a date of birth, some photos and an arrest record the man was almost a ghost. He had run afoul of a regular client and taken something – it never occurred to Danny to ask what – and there was no instruction about retrieving it. Nor was there a stipulation about bringing Arnett back alive. You didn’t send Danny Mur to collect anything other than scalps.
For all his skills at not getting caught or staying caught, Arnett still needed to eat and sleep, and he was gratifyingly indiscreet in his tastes in both. Danny tracked him down at a classy hotel he’d used before. It seemed Mr. Vol was a creature of narrow habits, and the next two days and nights Danny spent observing him bore this out. Same restaurant each night, same route home. He resolved to take him on the third night.
There was a fire exit to a shop near the mouth of the alleyway. At the time of night Arnett favoured coming home it provided just enough shadow for a man as big as Danny to stay out of sight. Among his assorted tools of the trade Danny carried a taser. He preferred a taser over a stun gun as the latter could only be used at close range, and the closer the range the greater the risk to the user. A taser’s barbs could be launched over fifteen feet, much longer than he required: he intended to shoot Arnett, and when the younger man went down Danny would drag him into the dead end of the alleyway and finish the job in minutes.
The taser barbs uncoiled through the night and caught Arnett in the soft skin on the side of his neck. As the familiar crackle of the current sounded out, it seemed to Danny that everything slowed down and sped up simultaneously. He recognised this as a surge of adrenaline and breathed out slowly. Arnett turned in the direction the attack had come from and his eyes met Danny’s as he stepped out from cover: he saw the pain and confusion in the other man’s eyes. And then he was looking at the illuminated store front a café across the street, and two taser barbs dropping out of thin air to the pavement below.
His mind had no time to ponder the real or unreal aspects of what had just happened. In his years on the job Danny Mur had learned not to think but to react, and it was this that saw him immediately drop the taser and step back into the semi-darkness of the alley. His eyes scanned the street left to right and back again – resisting the urge to look down at the taser barbs when they tinkled to the concrete, an innocent sound, an absurd sound – while his hands reached for a weapon.
Suddenly he could hear a man’s voice in pain, but not from where Arnett had been standing, should still have been standing, but from the alleyway behind him. The alleyway had been abandoned when he arrived – that careful nature of his, you always scouted out the killing ground and it didn’t pay to have witnesses – and his gun was in his hand seeking a target before his eyes had fully adjusted to the gloom.
A trick, he thought, a cute magic trick. A grudging sputter of admiration flitted through his mind even as he raised the weapon up. Arnett was leaning against a box of rubbish, trying to pull himself to his feet. Even though he’d pulled his disappearing act – trick, he reminded himself, just a trick – the taser had clearly got some juice into him and given his nerves a shock. Danny didn’t speculate any further. The hammer of the pistol clicked back . . .
. . . and Arnett’s head snapped up, exactly like an animal hearing a predator in long grass. Danny’s finger began to squeeze the trigger, but the other man was no longer there. Danny’s mind immediately recoiled, the sense of wrongness from mere moments ago returning . . .
. . . and Arnett was on him. It was like a bad jump cut in a movie. The smaller man had been nine feet away, maybe less. Suddenly, he was right there, his left palm swatting Danny’s wrist so hard that the gun flew from his right hand as fast as if he’d thrown it away on purpose. He had no time to register this fully because Vol followed this with a fast, hard knee to the groin that made his legs weak and his stomach threaten to rebel.
Danny was still aware enough to realise that the attack was more desperate than deliberate: the taser had taken something out of him. Arnett had collapsed into him when he threw the knee, Danny had heard the other man’s grunt close to his own left ear and over his own cry of pain. Instinctively, he grabbed with both arms, determined to at least keep Arnett close, relying on his significant size and strength advantage to buy him time to recover: half a plan already formed to bite the other man’s cheek or ear, give him something to think about. But as his arms closed, they closed on nothing.
Another bad jump cut, this time in his peripheral vision. There was nothing there, now Arnett was on his left somehow, swinging wild. A dull pain exploded on the left side of his face, that part of his head immediately hot. He vaguely registered the sound of wood clattering to the concrete, and realised Vol must have found a plank among the debris of the alleyway, hit him with it but been unable to keep his grip. He spun in that direction, a right hand that would have bought him time, but swung at nothing and almost overbalanced. No jump cut this time, but a solid boot to his kidneys that sent him sprawling on his front: Arnett was instantly behind him.
He recovered immediately, hearing Arnett’s shoes scrape a little closer to him, and he spun around and rising with a devastating uppercut, aiming to take the wind out of his opponent’s sails. He connected a little off target, but still felt Arnett rise up on his toes in pain, heard the air whoosh out of him . . .
. . . and then Vol’s weight was gone from the end of his arm, and he was following through on thin air again. He heard rather than saw him reappear this time, back at the dead end of the alley, back in the trap. The other man had almost crumpled, retching. Danny gathered himself, taking stock of his body’s complaints – left eye swelling, a dull, hollow ache between his legs that extended up to his stomach – and came on forwards anyway.
Twelve feet away now. He was used to taking some knocks, and a quick enough study to realise that he couldn’t afford Arnett the luxury of time. As his hands came out of his pockets with a pair of brass knuckles, Vol glanced up. Eight feet. He surprised Danny again, but this time because he – the disappearing man – had the audacity to shake his head in disbelief. Five feet, nearly striking distance. Before he could close the gap any further, Danny saw Arnett disappear again. And then Arnett had come at him.
* * * *
The two men faced one another, both swaying slightly, sweating. Breath fogging in the air, despite the night not cold. Blood was flowing between Arnett’s fingers from his ruined nose. Danny shook his head and thought better of it, realising that perhaps the younger man had rung his bell better than he had earlier realised.
All that went through Danny’s mind was finishing the job. That he was facing a man who could seemingly vanish and reappear at will became a problem to be solved instead of a wonder.
He was used to being the bigger, tougher man: normally someone Vol’s size, no matter how proficient a fighter, would always be at a disadvantage. He only had to properly hit Arnett once or twice, whereas for Arnett it would be like trying to chop down a tree with his hands. But Arnett’s manoeuverability, not constrained by normal planes of movement, negated Danny’s size and power.
He had to work out how to anticipate the jump cut, or where Arnett would reappear. He replayed what he had experienced so far, and quickly decided there was no tell, no telegraphing of the jump. Arnett was simply there, then he was not.
His mind moved methodically to the physical surroundings, and an idea presented itself. If Arnett was jumping out of nowhere, there should have been some kind of displacement. He was no physicist, but he knew that even something as insubstantial as air had mass: if Vol could just appear his body would have caused all that air to do something, surely. And what about the space Arnett had just vacated? A piece of rote from high school science surfaced in his mind like blood bubbling up from a wound: “Nature abhors a vacuum”. All that empty space would surely need to be filled.
Among the feelings of wrongness that had accompanied each of Arnett’s jump cuts, hadn’t there been a brief instant where he’d detected a faint coolness? Did air cool as it rushed in to fill a void? And had there been, not a sense of air moving, but an absence or air shortly before Arnett reappeared? He couldn’t be sure – each reappearance had demanded his full attention as another insult had rained down on his body – but his instincts said there was some truth to it. It was as though Arnett was simply somehow swapping places with the air in the place he was jumping to. Danny didn’t know if this was useful, but the small still voice of his instincts said it was.
The other question that immediately presented itself: if Arnett could do what he could clearly do, why hadn’t he used his gifts to escape?
Danny planted one hand on the wall to stabilise himself, pretending to be in more pain than he was while casting an assessing eye over Arnett. When he’d hit him with the taser and triggered the first disappearance, why didn’t the other man just jump to the other side of the street, or into an adjacent building, or on to a rooftop? Why had he leapt past Danny and in to the alleyway?
And why, when he’d connected with the uppercut, did the other man again leap back into the dead end?
Looking at him now, Danny made a few quick assumptions. Each of those jumps had been reactions, they were fight or flight, pure and simple. On both of those occasions, he’d jumped no further away than his line of sight. And when he was laying his beating on Danny, the jumps had been no more than a foot or so in any direction, and all close together. And now, stood with a broken nose – from experience Danny knew there would be trouble breathing, streaming eyes and blood running down his throat – Arnett wasn’t attempting to jump anywhere.
The disappearing trick was a physical skill, an incredible one, but evidently one that still required concentration to do well. If Danny could just hurt Arnett enough, he was betting the other man wouldn’t be jumping anywhere.
Time to test the theory.
He closed his eyes. For this part they were temporarily useless. He made a show of dragging the sole of one boot suddenly on the concrete, a feint as though he was renewing his attack, and waited. Less than a second later, he thought he felt that absence again, threw his eyes open and threw a hard, sharp left cross.
His aim was off, but the brass knuckles hit hard below Arnett’s throat: if his collarbone wasn’t broken, it was definitely fractured. Arnett disappeared again instantly, but Danny’s theory was borne out: it was a reaction jump, the lizard brain fleeing pain. He was already moving forward, and Arnett reappeared dropping to his knees, that weird sensation of a jump cut making Danny’s eyes feel like they had stuttered. Arnett was wheezing, his hands crossed over his chest as though in some kind of supplication. Danny took an extra few seconds to properly cock his right arm back before smashing the second set of brass knuckles into Vol’s jaw.
Arnett simply folded backwards at the knees, his strings cut. He was still conscious, but even in the dim light Danny could see he had broken his jaw. His breathing was laboured, choking. Danny planted his feet on either side of Arnett’s body, lowering himself to his knees so that he was straddling the younger man’s chest. He would finish this in one more punch, two at most, and then he would have some questions for his employer about what exactly they’d known about the talented Mr. Vol.
The dead man’s hands were flailing weakly in front of his face, a pathetic last attempt to fend off the inevitable. Danny had seen this before. The body fought on long after sensible thought had departed, the survival urge deeply ingrained. But Arnett would die, on his back, staring up at stars in this alleyway. He gently, almost tenderly, nudged the left hand away and moved to do the same to the right . . .
. . . and Arnett’s right hand clamped, with alarming strength and determination, on his left wrist. That sense of wrongness happened again, and he cursed instantly as he felt a moment of coolness and Arnett disappeared from his sight again. But he wasn’t looking at the floor of the alleyway. It took him seconds to realise what he was seeing, his mind completely disoriented as he realised it was not just Arnett who had vanished. Arnett had vanished him.
He heard a thump and looked to his left. Arnett had landed, hard. Danny saw him, his face red and disfigured from the nose on down. He barely saw two eyes above all the blood, defiant and clear, and then realised he himself was still moving, moving past Arnett somehow.
He turned around and realisation dawned. Fight or flight, he’d been correct about that. He’d been correct, too, about the line of sight. Arnett had jumped and taken him with him, jumped up to the top of the alleyway, towards the stars that should have been his final view. He couldn’t fight, so he’d taken flight. He had angled himself so that he landed on the nearby rooftop, and left Danny to gravity.
He turned in mid-air, his own survival impulses just as strong: a handhold, anything, a chance to buy time, to win. He saw the floor of the alleyway now, filling his vision, his killing ground rushing towards him.
The world vanished one last time.
The Unreliable Narrator 