Her Superhero Lover

Chapter 6

The first thing Renee was aware of was a bright light in her eyes. She wondered if she was dying, and it was the fabled ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ so many near death experiences talked about. She didn’t think so, after all she was cognizant of her body. At the same time however, she didn’t think she was in a hospital. It had been years, but she’d been in hospitals before, and the one thing she remembered was the constant electronic and machine noise. Whether it was ventilators hissing, heart monitors beeping or just the constant sound of squeaky shoes on linoleum, she had never known a hospital as quiet as she thought it was right now.

“Renee?” a voice asked, and it took her a moment to place it. It was a familiar voice, one she had come to enjoy, one she had come to trust. She thought it was one she could say she had even come to love…..”Renee? It’s Grady.”

Grady! Of course! Her eyes snapped open, only to blink shut again at the bright intensity of the overhead fluorescents. “Where am I?” she said, reaching up to shade her eyes. “What happened?”

“You’re in my lab,” Grady replied, standing next to her. She looked down, and could see that she was still in the cocktail dress from before, but Grady had ditched his coat somewhere. “I brought you here after you got shot.”

“Here?” she asked, looking around. The lab was done in eggshell white, and looked like something out of a futuristic computer lab. She thought it kind of looked like the starship Enterprise. “If I got shot, why’d you bring me here, and not to a hospital?”

Grady came around to sit beside her, and she could see the blood that still soaked his shirt. “Is… is that my blood?”

Grady looked at his shirt and nodded. “You were hit in your aortic arch. After the shooting, the gang ran like hell, and I jammed a popped balloon into the wound. I carried you out of there, saying you couldn’t wait for an ambulance, my Lotus was faster. I brought you here because even in the car, you technically died on me. I heard your heart stop, and even though I did everything I could, you were dead for four minutes before I could get you on the table. I was desperate, and did the only thing I could.”

Renee looked down at her chest again, and didn’t see any wound at all. “If I’d been shot, where’s the hole? Where’s my wound?”

Grady stood up and pulled off his shirt, exposing his chest to her. “I told you when we met that I have a PhD in engineering. And while that’s true, it’s not just that. I’m what doctors call a polymath, or someone who pretty much learns everything at first sight. I’m also the descendant of the Nephilim.”

“The what?” Renee asked, sitting up. She swung her legs over the edge of the lab table she was on and watched Grady step back. He spread his hands, and she felt her jaw drop as his light brown hair lightened to platinum blonde, and he began to hover six inches off the floor. “Holy God in heaven.”

“That’s one theory as to our abilities,” Grady replied, remaining where he was in the air. “There’s a whole series of Jewish and Christian scholars who state that the Nephilim were the offspring of angels who had s*x with human women. Of course, the scripture on this is limited, and seemed to state that the Nephilim were giants, with perhaps the story of Goliath being one of them. Another train of thought is that we’re demi-gods of some sort. Me, I don’t really have a clear theory one way or another. I choose the word Nephilim because that’s what my father taught me to use.

“There aren’t many of us left,” he continued, setting down on the ground. “But we have what you might call superhuman abilities. Most have far fewer abilities than I have.”

“What do you mean?”

Grady walked over to a cabinet set into the wall, and opened it. Inside, Renee was shocked to find the pale white and red outfit of The Horseman hanging on a mannequin inside. “This is what I mean.”

Renee came over and reached out a hand, almost afraid to touch the fabric. When the costume didn’t disappear, but instead felt solid under her fingertips, she realized it was real. “You…. you are The Horseman?”

“In the flesh,” Grady said, holding out his arm and pinching the skin for her. “The suit is made of a Kevlar and advanced polymer weave, so it’s pretty strong on its own. That combined with my own natural abilities means that for a lot of things, I’m pretty much invulnerable. But I knew there were some things that can hurt me. I’m not Superman or anything like that.”

“Like what?” Renee asked, intrigued.

“Well, most guns I meet on the streets won’t do much more than mess up the fabric and leave a good bruise,” he answered, pointing to some small rips in the cloth. “I heal very fast, so you may not have ever noticed them even. Getting back to the ammo, any normal pistol round short of a fifty caliber won’t break my skin. In rifle rounds, five-five-six, or the ammo shot out of an M-16, will hurt, but only cause a minor wound. A larger round like what is shot out of an AK-47 or a lot of hunting rifles can hurt me, especially in a vital area. And of course, with the rise of police wearing body armor, the idiots on the streets are shooting armor piercing rounds. Those can cause some damage too.”

“So what did you do to treat me?” Renee asked, bringing the conversation back to the mysterious lack of stitches, blood, or even scars on her body. “And why am I not dead?”

“These little wonders,” Grady said, holding up a small vial about two inches long. Inside, a silvery liquid sat, seemingly moving around on its own. “An invention of my own device. They’re nanobots, tiny little robots, each the size of a red blood cell. Individually they’re not all that smart, but when they work together, they immediately organize and can do amazing things. This little vial here has the computing power of your top of the line home computer, but more than that, the individual bots can do things to the body that are amazing. I designed them to assist me in repairing myself when I get injured, which has happened. After all, I can’t exactly stroll into the ER dressed as The Horseman.”

“No, that wouldn’t do well at all,” Renee said, looking at the vial. “So you injected me with this, and they fixed the damage.”

Grady nodded, but then exhaled. “There might be side effects though. Renee, I programmed the nanos to work on my body. They have in their programming an idea of what a baseline body is supposed to be. That baseline is me. They are designed to repair and return my cells to my normal abilities. I’ve never tried this stuff on a regular human before.”