Green Legacy (musc)
by Jaypat
Billy blocked the path. There was no getting by him. He was astride his Kona Mountain bike, and he had stopped sideways across the path, completely barricading the way. And he was staring at me, kind of hard and intense. I looked over at Jeremy beside me. We were both on our bikes and had been taking our usual route down the old railroad tracks to my house when Billy had just burst out of the trees, causing us to slam on our brakes to keep from hitting him.
What did he want? I mean, I knew who Billy was, but I didn’t know him. I was pretty sure every school had a guy like him. He was that tough, loner kid, the one you knew was dangerous, and that staying away from him was probably a good idea. I remember he got suspended once for bringing a knife to school. That was all I really needed to know about Billy. And since I was pretty much a nobody at school, I doubted he even knew my name. But here he was, staring at me like he was trying to bore holes in me with his eyes.
Jeremy and I didn’t say anything at first, we just kept looking back and forth between us and then over at Billy. He wasn’t budging. Now, running into Billy like this under ordinary circumstances would be pretty scary, but today it was especially weird. Billy hadn’t been in school all week because… well, because his dad got murdered, beaten to death, and the newspaper said he’d been thrown through a wall. No one was exactly sure how that could have happened. Billy had apparently been there and so had his mom, but neither of them could remember anything about it. The newspaper said it was shock. It was all pretty creepy. I mean I never knew a kid whose dad had been murdered. And I didn’t really know Billy, but here he was, scary as ever and now creepy, too.
“Hey,” I managed. Jeremy looked at me wide eyed. He obviously thought speaking to him was a bad idea. I don’t know, maybe he was right.
“Hey,” said Billy back. “We gotta talk.”
“We do?” I said. I really didn’t want to talk to him. I mean what would I say? Sorry about your dad? No one was sorry about his dad. Big Mike Calhoun had been bad news. He was a truck driver who used to smuggle stuff for the mob, or so the newspaper said. They reckoned his death was connected to that. Anyway, he had been a loud mouth and a bully and the general opinion was that we were better off without him. Billy, they said, was a chip off the old block.
And now he wanted to talk to me. “What about?” I asked.
“I don’t want to say here,” he said. “We need to go some place… private.”
I looked up and down the old railroad tracks. There wasn’t a soul in sight, except for Billy and Jeremy and me. I really didn’t like the idea of leaving the tracks and following him who knows where. “What’s wrong with here?”
“It’s too public,” he said. “Anyone could come along at anytime and… interrupt us.”
That was kind of my point.
“What do you want?” asked Jeremy. There was a shake in his voice. I wondered if my voice sounded the same way.
Billy looked over at him almost as if he was seeing him for the first time. “Not you. Just Sammy, here. You can go,” he said, moving his bike to the side. Jeremy took off like a shot. I had to remember to thank him for that later… if there was a later.
“Come on,” said Billy and he started down the tracks in the opposite direction. I paused for a moment, considering my options. I could take off and try to out ride Billy, but he was bigger than me and I was no athlete. I was pretty sure he’d catch me and then things might be worse… if they could get worse.
He paused and looked back. “Are you coming or what?”
I shrugged, hopped on my bike and took off after him.
We rode in silence. I had no idea what to say to him. I knew nothing about him—except that his dad was murdered—not exactly a great way to start a conversation.
The tracks were lined with old warehouses and industrial buildings, half of which were deserted. I kept getting the feeling someone was watching us through the empty windows as we rode by. It was pretty creepy. Finally we came to an old junk yard, a place where they crushed old car bodies into small cubes. Looked like it would be a great place to hide a body.
“This is it,” said Billy hopping off his bike and letting it fall to the ground. He pulled off his backpack and let it fall next to it.
“So what’s this about?” I asked while dismounting and leaning my bike against a derelict car. Billy held a finger up, gesturing me to be quiet. Then he walked over to the giant car compactor and opened up a small panel on the side. It looked like the controls were in there. He pulled a pair of pliers or something from his pocket and did something. I couldn’t see what because he blocked my view with his body.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making sure everything’s just right,” he said.
Crap! What was I getting myself into?
He checked his watch and then gestured for me to follow him. He walked over to this old derelict car that was sitting nearby. The thing didn’t have an engine or seats or anything; it was just a shell. He climbed in through the passenger window and crawled over to the driver’s side and squatted down on the floor. “Come on,” he said, gesturing me in. “They’ll be back soon.”
I tried the door but it didn’t work. “I’m not getting in there. I’ll get filthy,” I said.
“You gonna be a wuss? Afraid of a little dirt?”
“I’m not a wuss,” I said climbing into the car and squatting next to him on the passenger side. If I were a wuss, I secretly thought, I’d have made a run for it long ago. And I did get filthy. I looked around the dingy wreck. What was I doing here? “Ok, we’re here. What do you want?”
“What do you know about your dad?”
What the…? My dad? How did we get here? “I don’t have a dad,” I said.
“Everybody’s got a dad,” he looked really bitter when he said that. “How could you be here if you didn’t have a dad?”
“Sure I have a dad like that. It’s just that he left before I was born.”
“You ever hear from him?”
This was too weird. What did Billy Calhoun care about my dad? “No. Mom said he didn’t know about me when he left.”
Billy looked really disappointed like he was hoping for a different answer. What was going on here? I couldn’t help myself; I had to ask. “Does this have something to do with what happened to your dad?”
He whipped his head toward me and there was so much fury in his eyes, it scared me. “Big Mike wasn’t my dad,” he said.
“He wasn’t?” I gasped before I could stop myself. “But I thought…”
“Yeah, so did I… until last week.”
Ok, now I was in a world of confusion, but before I could say anything else, I heard the sound of gruff voices.
“Get down,” said Billy. “Don’t let them see you.” I hunkered down lower. The last thing I wanted was to be discovered here. I’d get in so much trouble I’d never see the outside of my room.
I heard the whining clunking sound of the car compactor starting up. Billy put his hand on my shoulder. “Ok,” he said, “This is where it’s going to get a little weird.” What was he talking about? This whole thing had been pretty damn weird. “Just trust me,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Suddenly I heard a huge clunk and the whole car shook like something hit it. “What was that?” Then the car started rising up into the air. “What the fuck?” I started scrambling for the window, but Billy pulled me back. “What are you, crazy? We’ve got to get out of here!”
“No,” he said. “Leave now and you’ll ruin everything.”
“Then I’ll fucking ruin everything!” I tried to get away from him but he pulled me down and pinned me to the floor. “Get the fuck off of me!” I shouted as I tried to escape him. Finally he loosened his grip and I was able to make it to the window. But it was too late. We had to be at least forty feet off the ground. If I jumped now I’d break my neck.
“OhmyGod OhmyGod OhmyGod,” I said. We were swinging toward the compactor. I turned on Billy. “What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing? You want to die? Is that what you want? You want to die?”
“No one’s going to die,” he said, looking at me as calm as a cucumber. And he wasn’t just looking at me. He was examining me. I’d like to say it was weird but we’d moved well beyond weird at this point.
“You’re cracked,” I said, “You’re fucking cracked.” And then the car dropped. In a second both of us flew up, hit the ceiling and then slammed back to the floor. I was in a world of pain. The wind was completely knocked out of me and I could tell I was bleeding somewhere on my head, on my back and on one of my legs. Billy looked pretty beat up, too, except he had this kind of eerie grin on his face. “This is where it gets good,” he said.
“You’re a fucking lunatic,” I said. I was going to die. Billy Calhoun was going to kill me in some kind of freaky murder/suicide. Who could have seen that coming?
“Why me?” I asked him. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You were born,” he said, and then the walls started closing in.
“Fuck,” I said. “FUCK!”
And Billy started laughing. It was the kind of laugh you laugh when you’re going over the first drop on a rollercoaster. “This is fucking it,” he shouted. “This is fucking it!”
And I watched the car walls slowly start to buckle inwards. “Yes!” shouted Billy. “I can feel it! Can you fucking feel it, Sammy?” he shouted. I just looked at him and quickly shook my head. He was crazy and I was beyond talking now.
And then it happened. Billy started to swell. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. I thought maybe he was being squished, or hyperventilating or something, but it didn’t stop. His t-shirt just kept filling out, kind of like a balloon. And then I noticed his arms. His forearms were thick with corded muscle. Billy was pretty fucking strong… but wait. They weren’t like that when we climbed into the car. I’d’ve noticed. I looked at his face. He was still grinning but his teeth were clenched and he was shaking slightly, like he was in being electrocuted or something. He had gotten really pale, kind of sickly looking, and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists. And then I saw his biceps. Holy fuck! They were stretching his sleeves. He had big fucking arms! No, he didn’t. Arms like that stand out. I would have seen. And holy shit, his shirt… Now that it was pulling tight I could see it wasn’t filling with air like a balloon; it was filling with a pair of monstrous pecs. Crap. Look at the size of those things, rising above his slender, flat stomach. Still shaking Billy looked down at his burgeoning chest. “Yeah,” he said. “Oh yeah.” And then he started flexing it, making his pecs bulge bigger and bigger. Once, twice RIIIIIIIP! The huge mounds erupted out of his shirt, pulsing with striated power. “FUCK YEAH!” he shouted. And his voice, like his neck, had gotten thicker.
Then he raised his arm. Christ! It had doubled in size in the last few seconds. He flexed and a huge ball of muscle exploded out of his upper arm completely destroying his shirt sleeve. My mouth dropped open.
“Like my guns, Sammy?” he said. His grin was fucking cocky as hell now. You like ‘em now just wait. You’re gonna love what comes next.”
I heard more cloth tearing, but it was the deeper, richer sound of heavier cloth. I looked down and saw his jeans ripping apart as the biggest pair of thighs I’d ever seen forced their way out of his pants. “Fucking huge, Sammy,” he said. “Fucking huge.”
One last rip as bowling ball shoulders rolled and flexed as he shrugged off the remains of his shirt. Sitting next to me was the biggest, most muscular kid I’d ever seen.
“Ok, Sammy,” he said, that cocky grin still plastered to his face. “Now that the preliminaries are over, here I really fucking go!” And then he started growing. He started to get taller and as he did it was like muscles began bubbling up all over him, huge bulbous masses of power, erupting out of him the way zits erupted out of most kids. There wasn’t a muscle on his body that didn’t became overwhelmingly massive, growing thicker, heavier, bigger, stretching out under his skin while his frame grew wider and taller. His body just seemed to be blowing up impossibly huge in every dimension. And all the time, as he grew more and more colossal, he was laughing that roller coaster laugh while he watched himself explode with insane size and power. “Yeah! FUCK yeah!” In an instant he had reached the roof and effortlessly pushed his way through it; his biceps, now bigger than watermelons and with vine-like veins running all over them, barely stressing. As he stood up, I saw him rise up and up and up, until he was a monstrous tower of muscle, standing on thighs as big around as jumbo trash cans, each head sharply defined under his hairless skin. He kicked the pieces of car from around him like toilet paper from a shoe. He pulled a double bicep and I couldn’t help gasping as those watermelons balled up and doubled in size. “Even fucking bigger this time,” he said with that grin. Then, with one mighty arm, he reached out, his mammoth triceps forming a gargantuan horseshoe with just that simple motion. He held his meaty palm out, and as the compactor wall hit it, it stopped. He hardly seemed to notice.
I looked up at him, this inhumanly massive muscle giant that had only seconds before been Billy Calhoun. He was at least eight feet tall, there was no question. One of his abs, for God’s sake, was bigger than my head. And he had ten, boulder like abs leading down from that twin fucking wrecking ball chest to his groin. He must have been wearing some kind of spandex stretchy thing under his jeans, ’cause what he had on now looked like a black poser stretched to its limits. But it was pretty obvious all of his anatomy had grown proportionately. And his face, though sickly pale, almost green, still had that cocky grin.
“So, Sammy,” he said, looking down at me, lying battered on the car floor, “Is there something you want to tell me?”
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just lay there, breathing hard, sacred out of my wits staring up at the massiveness of him.
“Ok,” he said. “Have it your way.” And he let go of the wall. With one jump, he leaped to the rim and stood there looking down at me as the compactor continued to slowly crush the car, and me with it.
“Fuck!” I screamed. “What are you doing? Help me? Fucking help me!”
“Help yourself,” he said.
Half crying, half screaming, I started to try and get to my feet, but the shifting metal of the compacting car made it impossible. I tired crawling out, but it was too late. The metal of the car body was closing in around me, grabbing me like a pincer, starting to crush me.
I heard him yell, “Fuck!” and I felt the compacter shake as though it was struck by something heavy. It stopped. Then I saw the layers of metal being pulled back by those insanely massive arms. In a second he was lifting me out and then he leapt and we were air borne. I felt the thud of impact as he landed on the ground. He lay me down on the ground by my bike.
He stood there for a minute staring down at himself, clenching and unclenching his fists, watching his impossibly gigantic muscles bulge and relax. Then he looked at me.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “If you try to run, I’ll catch you and it won’t be pretty.”
I didn’t know what to say. I figured Billy wasn’t going to kill me. If he’d wanted me dead, he never would have pulled me from the compactor. And at the moment, I didn’t feel much like running anyway. I was dizzy and nauseous and lying there suited me fine. I supposed I should have told him I wasn’t going anywhere, but in another dazzling display of silence, I said absolutely nothing. Maybe I was in shock. After what I’d just been through, I certainly deserved to be.
Billy turned his attention to the piles of derelict cars. I propped myself up a little and watched him. The first thing he did was grab one at the bottom of a stack of about twenty. His massive back barely tensing, he ripped it out. The tower of cars toppled and fell right on top of him. But, they might as well have been autumn leaves for all the notice he took. One blow from his mighty arm and a falling car would fly half way across the junk yard. He picked up one of the wrecks, raised it above his head and threw it about thirty yards into another stack of gutted vehicles; the pile fell to the ground with a deafening clatter, raising up a huge pile of dust. Then he picked up another wreck and proceeded to crush it with his bare hands. His gargantuan arms, bulging and flexing, he wadded it up into a ball, the way you would wad a piece of paper, and with almost as little effort. Then he held the wad of crushed metal above his head like a basketball and shot a perfect three pointer into the compactor bin. Fuck.
He saw me watching and called, “Hey, Sammy, how about a little one on one?” The cocky grin never left his face, but the strange thing was I got the feeling he was only half kidding.
He picked up another car, crushed it and threw another three pointer. “Swish!” he said as I heard the metal wad bang around inside the compactor bin. Fucking swish? Was he kidding? Then I guess he got board with that because he jumped… fuck, he jumped up to the top of one of the car piles. It had to be at least thirty feet, and he did it in one fucking leap. But when he landed on the top car, it couldn’t take the force and it skittered off the pile. I saw those fucking massive arms of his twirling like windmills as he tried to keep his balance while the car slid off. It hit the pile next to it and sent Billy crashing into it. Then both piles came thundering down, with Billy somewhere in the middle.
I stood up. A huge cloud of dust was settling around this twenty foot high mound of wrecked cars. Billy was under that. Should I be worried? Relieved? I didn’t know. Then I saw the whole mound shake and suddenly a car erupted out of it, flying about twenty feet up and landing about thirty feet away. It reminded me of the way you spit out an orange seed. And then another one followed it. And then a third. I didn’t get too close. If I got hit with one of those things, I’d be dead in an instant. When the dust settled a little more, I could make out Billy’s gargantuan form tossing cars into the air, one after the other. He reminded me of a little kid tossing sand at the beach. He just seemed to be having a blast, shooting them up and watching them crash back down again.
I returned to my seat by my bike and watched Billy tear up the junk yard for another hour. It seemed like there wasn’t anything he couldn’t lift or throw or crush. At one point he even hoisted the car compactor over his head. But after that thundered to the ground, he started to look a little tired. He started walking towards me, but pretty soon his walk turned into stumble. His eyes started to blink. He looked like he was fighting off sleep.
And then he began to dwindle. Slowly his muscles began to shrink. It was like they were collapsing in on top of themselves and being sucked back into his body. At the same time he was getting shorter and his skin was loosing that sickly green hue and starting to look healthy again.
The tattered piece of cloth that had been his only covering was now starting to sag, droop and slide down. He noticed and grabbed it, holding it up, bunching it up in his fist and keeping it warped around him as it grew looser.
In just a couple of minutes he was just Billy again, just a kid like the rest of us. He was filthy, covered in dirt and dust and grease as he staggered over to his back pack and slumped on the ground. For a second I thought he was going to pass out.
“You ok?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “just wiped. It leaves me wiped. But this helps.”
He opened up his backpack and pulled out a can of Monster energy drink and started guzzling it down. Monster? That was kind of funny. I might have laughed if I hadn’t been partially still in shock.
Billy finished he drink quickly and began pulling stuff out of his back pack. He had another t-shirt and pants in there, plus another pair of sneakers. He had planned this! He had planned the whole thing! He had known exactly what was going to happen from the moment he ambushed me and Jeremy on the tracks. And I couldn’t help notice he had a second set of clothes in there, too. Was he planning to change again?! Fuck! What was going on here?
Billy lost no time in pulling on his fresh t-shirt and pants. And suddenly it was just another hot September day and we could have been any two kids hanging out in a scrap yard.
“Gotta get some food,” said Billy pulling on his back pack and mounting his bike. He turned to look at me. “You coming?”
Crap. It looked like he was actually giving me a choice. I don’t know why I did what I did. Maybe it was all my unanswered questions. A smart kid would have hopped on his bike and tore off in the opposite direction. In the state he was in now, Billy would never have been able to catch me. I could have been home and under my bed in fifteen minutes.
But for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, I wasn’t scared of him. A smart kid would have been. A smart kid would have been half a mile away by now. I guess I just wasn’t a smart kid, because instead of running for my life, I just said, “sure,” and I hopped on my bike and I followed on after him.