Shadowloss - Part 5/7

Capture! Escape!

This is Part 5 of “Shadowloss,” a serialized novella about a man who loses shadow. If you need to catch up or refresh, find:

• Part 1 here

• Part 2 here

• Part 3 here

• Part 4 here

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[Est. reading time: 7 minutes]

Thea was right. That kid showed up again the next morning on Twitch. In less than an hour, his stream broke 10 million views, and that number kept right on climbing.

She was also right about the upside. The stream was obviously pulling heavy revenue just from donations. "And that's on top of whatever Twitch paid him for the exclusive," Thea said.

"How much, do you think?"

"Let's not do that."

But when my phone started ringing, it wasn't Twitch, or anyone else offering money. It was the CDC, who politely "requested" that I stay exactly where I was. Shortly thereafter, a gaggle of government employees in hazmat suits arrived.

Thea shouted some strong words about my rights, but they didn't seem very interested, and there were a whole lot more of them than there were of us. Also some of them had guns.

The hazmat suits were a bad sign, because it suggested that someone somewhere had decided this whole phenomenon was the result of a biological agent, which made exactly zero sense. But that did nothing to prevent them from loading me into the back of an empty, white-walled shuttle after dispossessing me of my personal effects.

"I'll get you out of this!" Thea called out right before they slammed the doors.

Then I was alone, and doubting myself. Most people are predisposed to trust people in uniform, and I wasn't different from most people. Was I contagious? Had I contracted some strange virus or bacterial infection? Could that possibly explain the absence of my shadow? What about my shirt's shadow?

The absurdity of that position made me laugh out loud, all by myself. "Believe science," I whispered.

What a comfort, to be in the firm grip of such competence.

Thankfully, they turned out to be harmless, at least. After carefully "securing me" in a beige room furnished with a hospital bed and a chair for my leisure, they reassured me that I would be able to leave as soon as they could determine that my condition was not contagious.

"What makes you think it's contagious?" I asked the faceless voice that had been explaining the situation to me over a speaker by the locked door.

After several ominous seconds of silence it said, "I'm sorry, but that information is classified."

I slumped down in a chair and flipped on the TV they'd been kind enough to provide. It had a third-rate catalog of movies loaded onto it, but nothing live. I turned it off again, pining for access to the internet with an almost physical pain.

I wondered what was happening on the Twitch stream that was no doubt still happening right now.

I'll dispense with the dull details of the next few weeks. If other accounts are to be believed (god I hope they aren't), I was lucky. In all the testing they did, no one ever came in and surgically removed an arm or a leg to see if severed limbs might start casting shadows again. It would have been redundant anyway. If the shirt I was wearing had lost its shadow, it stood to reason that hacking off an appendage wouldn't give its shadow back either.

Anyway. Between all the tests they ran, I had a lot of time to think. I wish I could say I used it better, but I spent most of it on self pity. It didn't help that they refused to share any of the test results with me. Judging by various reactions from some of the lab technicians (lots of literal head scratching), my best guess is it was mostly all a crap shoot.

The best thing that came out of those weeks is that I tried to get honest about when Kat had started cheating on me, and what part I might have had in all that. As much of a bitch as she'd been, she wasn't completely wrong. I gave up a lot of my ambitions. I settled way too early. I got comfortable with drifting through a life I didn't particularly enjoy.

I mean, even back when Suds brought me on, he had offered me a much heavier role, but I didn't want the lift. It would have meant a bigger stake in the company, but less pay in the short term, and I turned him down. Said something about the mortgage. But Kat and I would have been just fine. It was the effort I was avoiding.

As I rode that train of thought, it started to feel real appropriate that my shadow had run away. It was just following my lead.

The metallic shhhunk of the airlock opening interrupted the high-pitched hum of the filtration system. My visitor wasn't wearing a body suit. She was around 60, I'd guess, and petite, with short gray hair and fierce blue eyes that looked pissed off, but not at me.

"Come on," she said. "We're leaving."

Her name was Cadence, and "we" were all the lab rats that had been less than regularly attended to for the past couple of days. She filled me in as we made our way to the exit.

"Shadowloss," so-called, had spread. A lot. There was a general revolt among the employees that had been keeping and testing us, as most of them had lost their shadows in the past week, and, as I suspected, all that testing hadn't gotten them much closer to comprehending what the hell was going on.

So most of them just stopped showing up, without much consideration for us, literally locked inside the labs. Bastards. Thankfully, someone had purposefully left a few holding rooms unlocked before, basically, fleeing the premises.

Why the hurry? Cadence explained that martial law had been enacted to try to deal with riots. Riots? Riots. The problem, we were learning, wasn't so much the shadows going missing -- that was harmless. It was the hysteria that was a natural reaction to the widespread and very specific failure of the laws of physics. There was every kind of conspiracy theory, every kind of doomsday cult, every sort of wild fantasy, but no answers. Nobody believed anything, everybody believed everything, because logic didn't seem to work anymore.

You may argue that that was the way things were going before the shadows left. You're right, of course, but obviously it all got way worse way faster as shadowloss spread.

An even simpler explanation, maybe more accurate, is that the global economy went into a tailspin. Markets don't like uncertainty. Those rules don't change. That definitely shouldn't have surprised me, because I had studied finance in college. But it was boring, so I didn't keep it up. Now, like everyone else, I was surprised to hear there were runs on banks and grocery stores.

Out in the parking lot, a dozen or so of us fought for turns on two phones that had been procured on the way out. Eventually, other people (security guards, cleaning staff, and a very small number of researchers who hadn't given up all hope) gravitated toward our little group and started offering rides. Which, I'll admit, after spending weeks in near total isolation, brought hot tears to my eyes.

When I finally got my hands on one of those phones, I called Thea. It went straight to voicemail, so I left a message saying I'd be back at my house because where else was I going to go, given the circumstances.

I did consider not calling Kat, but that felt wrong. We were still married, after all. And despite my best efforts to the contrary, I missed her. Again, let me refer to those long, empty hours between pointless testing by faceless strangers.

But she didn't answer either. I could imagine that she had tried calling me a number of times, and probably assumed I'd ghosted her, which felt bad. But what could I do. I left another message.

I called my parents, who lived in Ohio, which was very far away, and therefore not very useful, but I wanted to let them know I was OK. They didn't answer either.

And then I was out of numbers I could dial from memory. I handed the phone to the next person in line, and hitched a ride with a car heading toward the valley. Shadow or no shadow, the only thing I could think about was how good it would feel to sleep in my own bed. If you can believe it, I even looked forward to seeing the Odies. Loneliness is a crooked medicine.

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Continue to Part 6…