Free Strangers in the Night by Raymond S Flex Page A

over’ whatever ailment it was that he’d been suffering from.
    Maybe they thought Mitts’s lengthy sleeping patterns had to do with his miraculous recovery.
    But Mitts didn’t feel all that miraculous.
    All that special .
    Apart from the weird visions, the lucid dreams . . . that strange encounter he’d had seven years ago when he’d crawled through the air ducts, come face to face with that grey-purple hunk of flesh . . . he thought of himself as a reasonably normal kid.
    Though what did ‘reasonably normal’ even mean?
    As far as he knew, he might be the only eighteen-year-old kid on the planet.
    Now, that was a scary thought . . .
    Was there anything as scary as being unique?
    Mitts took up his place at the kitchen table, realising in short order why his mother had blushed.
    She was, of course, baking his birthday cake.
    His mother turned her back on the oven and pressed on a guilty smile. “Well,” she said, “it should only be ten minutes, I was hoping to have it on the table by the time you got out of bed.”
    Mitts glanced to his father and Floo.
    In that moment, Floo, kneeling up on her high stool so that she could get the best view of the surface, turned over a card and then immediately, with a slap which shook the entire table top, cried, “ SNAP !”
    Mitts turned back to his mother, who was smiling again.
    “But,” she said, “I’d be surprised if anyone could sleep with that racket going on.”
    Mitts shrugged his shoulders. He had a few aches from the press-ups he’d done the night before.
    Whenever he did any serious thinking, he worked out.
    And he had had some serious thinking to do all right.
    Maybe he’d overdone it a little.
    He massaged his left upper arm, feeling a little knot just below the bicep.
    “You’re looking buff,” his father put in.
    Feeling a touch distracted, off in his own little world, as he found himself more and more these days, Mitts put on the best polite smile he could muster, and said, “Yeah, I don’t want to turn into a blob, or anything.”
    His father laid a card down, and—as a result—Floo hammered down her palm on top of it, declaring, again, “ SNAP !”
    “It’s one thing turning into a ‘blob’,” his father replied, “it’s another to try and buff yourself up into some sort of superhero.”
    Mitts sniffed a laugh. He wondered if—perhaps—his father might’ve taken that as an underhanded jibe at his weight gain over these seven years.
    But that was the truth.
    Whereas before, his father had been just like him—skinny as a pole, not a scrap of extra fat on him—his father had grown consistently podgier as the years passed by.
    So much so that he now wore the waistband of his jeans slung beneath his burgeoning gut.
    Mitts’s mother, over at the oven, announced that the cake was ready for serving.
    And then she made the same non-joke she had made every single birthday since they had resided in the Compound. The one about them having to imagine candles because they had none.
    But Mitts was done with imagining.
    He was done with the Compound.
    With the Restricted Area.
    Now was the time to move on.
    To get back out into the real world.
    As Mitts’s mother laid the cake before him, as his family all sang him happy birthday, Mitts found his gaze wandering. Over to the kitchen doorway.
    He saw him there.
    Heinmein.
    Lurking.
    Just like the early days, Heinmein refused to use crutches. But, for some reason, when Mitts had observed Heinmein out in the corridors, he noted that he no longer had the same difficulties walking.
    In fact, when Mitts did observe him walking about the corridors of the Restricted Area, he noticed that Heinmein now had a fairly normal gait.
    His cleanliness, too, had improved.
    Mitts didn’t feel anywhere near as hostile toward him as he had in the early days.
    For whatever purpose, Heinmein had attempted to cure him.
    And whether Heinmein had fed him some sort of unintended miracle cure, or if there had been some