Memoirs of a Supervillain - Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Chapter 2 – Midnight Train

I blame the next few years of my life after running away from home on TV and movies. There’s a somewhat romanticized view of ‘hobos’ moving around the country by riding the rails, stowing away on freight trains for an easy way to get from A to B. Hell, there was even some of that in that movie about the escaped convicts in the deep south. I mean, even if you weren’t homeless, there were songs and stuff about just getting on a train and going someplace. 

So I guess when I ran away from home, it was only natural that I ended up at the rail yards. Truth is, I really had no plan, except getting away from home, from family, from me, from everything. Getting to the rail yard was easy. Getting past the perimeter was a little trickier, since they did have fences and stuff to keep people from just wandering around where they could get run over by trains or steal stuff, but enough people had less than legal meetings there that the hole in the fence was easy to get through once I found it.

The first real challenge I had was figuring out where to go from here. I was still in freak out mode, which meant my icy mist was following me around everywhere. While that made sneaking around at night easier, it would be about like shooting off a road flare to people, letting them know where I was.

I forced myself to stop and think about things. Figure out my next move. But that just got me feeling angry, mainly at myself, because I’d just been Grade A stupid about everything that night. I could have gone home. But I was embarrassed, and I was angry at myself for being embarrassed, and it was so much easier to just be angry and keep going than turning back and facing the music. And all the time there was this goddamn mist floating around me!

I don’t know why I punched the window. Maybe I just needed to hit something? Anyways, the window broke, and I got a nasty cut on my hand, that was bleeding and hurt like hell. And in that, I found my focus.

Fear is primal. Fear of the unknown. Fear of death. Fear of any number of things that can take a frail human being and end their existence. That is why it takes training to master yourself in the face of fear, and to keep from letting that primal lizard part of your brain going to the fight or flight response.

Pain is also primal. It is your body’s way of saying that something is wrong, that there is something you really ought to be paying attention to. But pain is also far easier for someone to learn to ignore, to work with, to push past. Before I’d become a freak, I was a football player. I knew pain. Pain was an old friend to me. Full contact practice, two-a-days in the summer heat, game day… pain was always there, step by step, and I knew how to deal with pain. I knew how to work through the pain, to use it.

Pain was what saved me. It sounds stupid, but it is true. That cut on my hand froze over, sealing the wound with ice, and the mist surrounding me faded away. When I concentrated on the pain, the fear and anger didn’t rule me, didn’t make me lose control of my newfound powers.

I was in control for the moment, but I knew that wouldn’t last forever. I was still too raw for that. But now that I was thinking clearly, I had the beginnings of a plan in mind. I was at the rail yards, and there were more than a few refrigerated cars, for shipping food cross-country. It was child’s play to find one. Of course, the door was locked, and I didn’t carry a key for a random padlock.

That was the first time I consciously tried to use my powers, not just control or suppress them when they went haywire. For the first time, I reached out, and tried to freeze something. It wasn’t easy. Sure, I could snap a padlock in under a second now, but back then, I was raw, untrained. So it took a couple minutes of concentration, but soon the lock was broken, and I’d slipped into the freight car.

The first thing I noticed after closing the door behind me was that I wasn’t cold. Not in a ‘still have my coat on as I stepped in the freezer’ way, but in a ‘I can tell it is cold, but it doesn’t affect me’ way. Taking off my coat didn’t change anything. This was impressive, since I was on a frozen food car, and the temperature was currently below freezing.

There are some people who just wake up and decide to be heroes or villains. They have power, and so they intend to use it, either for their cause, or because they had read too many comic books, or simply because they could. I was not one of those people. My concerns were far more grounded. I was homeless, with all of fifty dollars in my pocket, and a power I couldn’t control. I wasn’t hungry just yet, and money wasn’t going to do me any good in a rail car, so I focused on my power. Wishing wasn’t going to make this go away, so I’d just have to learn to deal with it.

My initial attempts at controlling my power were honestly laughable. With a bunch of concentration, I managed to make a vaguely knife-shaped shard of ice. It was just normal ice, though, so it would break the moment I tried to use it for anything, and unless I focused on keeping it cold, it would start to melt and lose its edge. But doing that did show me that creation was possible, along with being immune to the cold and able to freeze things I touched.

At some point, the train had started moving, taking me who knows where. I didn’t bother checking which trains were going to which destinations, after all. I turned back to my training, trying to ignore the fact that each moment the train chugged on, I was swiftly leaving my old life behind, never to return. I didn’t know what was in store for me, but I knew that my life would probably never be the same again.

It was sometime the next morning when I noticed that the train was slowing down again. Not stopping, but taking a peek out the door let me see that we were heading through a small town. I was currently surrounded by frozen fish sticks, but with no way to cook them they might as well have been rocks. That meant I needed to go and get some food. Which meant getting off a moving train.

Well, there is a difference between a ‘moving’ train and a ‘speeding’ train. Freight trains don’t actually go all that fast, especially when they’re heading through small towns with railway crossings and all of that. Simply isn’t safe, for the most part. Anyways, that meant I only needed to jump off a train going about 20 MPH instead of one going 50 or 60 MPH. That’s a huge difference when you’ve never done it before.

For those of you who are wondering, unless you are really sure of yourself, don’t try and stick the landing when you’re jumping from a train. Unless you have a power that says otherwise, physics works on everyone the same, and trying to ‘hit the ground running’ is a great way to end up breaking your neck because you did something stupid on accident. No, what you want to do is make like a limp rag, letting your legs absorb as much of the impact as they can while you go to the ground. You want to be limp, because otherwise you’ll fuck up your legs. When you fall, your body should be moving in the same direction as the train, so duck your shoulder, and roll with it, to keep from smacking your head. Don’t try to catch yourself with your arms, or you’ll hurt yourself. Make sure you’re rolling AWAY from the track. The train will absolutely not care one bit about your stupid ass if you roll under the wheel by mistake, and you’ll be lucky if you’re only crippled at that point.

If that sounds like there’s a lot of ways for you to hurt yourself jumping off a train, that’s because there’s a fucking ton of ways to hurt yourself jumping off a train, and it really isn’t something you should do unless you are confident you can pull it off. Especially if you’re traveling alone, since trying to treat a broken arm with what you can scrounge up as a homeless person in the woods is NOT fun. Dead men don’t make good supervillains, unless you’re some form of undead.

Walking into town, I found out I was in Tennessee. I didn’t really care about the town, so much as I just wanted to find someplace I could get some cheap grub. Fortunately, McDonalds is universal, so three bucks got me a couple sausage biscuits and a coke to drink while I planned my next move.

And I knew that I did have to make a plan. I’d been coasting on the fear and anger, and that had gotten me absolutely nowhere. I was fifteen, alone, and had just become the thing I hated most in the world. The fact that I was still breathing was a testament to luck and my fear forcing me to hesitate. It was not a pleasant thought, and I was nowhere near so emotionally stable as to think entirely rationally about things that way. After all, I WAS only fifteen.

So it really shouldn’t have surprised me that after an hour or two of ‘planning’, which really meant moping and feeling sorry for myself, and then getting upset at feeling sorry for myself, I lost control of my powers again, and suddenly McDonald’s was full of an icy mist, knocking visibility down to zero. I freaked at that, and managed to stumble outside. I pulled my knife, and used it to cut my hand, like I’d done the night before. Unlike the night before, I had to keep moving, since it was daylight, and I was causing a scene. I ducked down an alleyway, went across the next street over, and into some woods, concentrating on my pain as I did so.

The calm came quicker now, though still far too slow for me to avoid causing a scene in the town. I basically resolved that from now on I’d spend as little time as I could around people, until I had a better handle on my abilities. I didn’t want to leave a trail connecting me to my old life. Better that everyone just forget about me and move on. Gripping my aching palm, I breathed deeply, centering myself.

I didn’t know how long it would be until I saw another train, especially one that was headed the same way I was going before. So until one came by, I might as well start training my skills. I couldn’t lose control of my powers if I worked them to the point of exhaustion, right?