Busted Flush Read Free

antiseptic testing room at BICC. Biological Isolation and Containment Center—who thinks these names up, anyway?
    God, I hate government facilities. Why on earth would anyone build anything in an abandoned salt mine? And in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, to boot . . .
    “The purpose of the test is to see how much force you can absorb, Miss Pond.” The disembodied voice belonged to Dr. Pendergast. His voice was normally silky smooth, so it was hard to tell when he was really pissed. But there was a hint of anger and I knew I’d been bad.
    But, really, how many more times could they pound the living crap out of me? I was beginning to feel like Wile E. Coyote. Drop me down into that canyon one more time, boss. Or shoot me with a death ray. Your choice.
    I wasn’t even certain what they were testing me for anymore. At first, it was the usual: some joker with a face that could stop a clock and biceps the size of watermelons. He gave me a left hook that I kinda felt. I tried not to laugh at the look of disappointment on his unfortunate face.
    Then they started with the cannonballs, bullets, walls on springs. Honestly, who the hell has walls on springs, just, you know, lying around? I mean, did
none
of these guys watch
American Hero
? You’d’ve thought they’d never heard of the Amazing Bubbles.
    But the superweird thing was that they didn’t want me to bubble. In fact, Dr. Pendergast made it very clear that he didn’t want
any
bubbling. I tried to explain to him that when I got hit with as much raw energy as they were throwing at me, I
had
to bubble. It hurt not to.
    But Dr. Pendergast didn’t care about that. He was only interested in how much power I could absorb. They’d already found out my max size would just about fill an eight-by-eight room. But I was no Bloat. They told me that when I stopped growing in size I started getting denser. Heavier, but no larger. I kinda got the feeling this was very interesting to them.
    The problem was, after they got me as fat as I could get, and they kept throwing more and more force at me, I was finding it more difficult to bubble it off after the tests. The denser I got, the more powerful I became, but the harder it was to access my power. Hell, I could barely lift one of my pudgy fingers.
    And it didn’t help that every time I got hit, it brought back memories. Memories that I didn’t want to face. So I did what I usually do—I thought about something else. Thought about anything that would distract me from what was rattling around my head like a bad Rob Zombie movie.
    Thinking about Ink naked usually did the trick.
    “Okay, Miss Pond, we’ll go again.”
    “Yeah? I don’t think so,” I replied. I flung my hands out and released an enormous stream of bubbles, and I could feel my clothes getting looser. I grabbed a handful of waistband with my left hand to keep my pants from falling off.
    The bubbles bounced around the room, but I kept bubbling with my right hand. As I filled the room, the bubbles just sort of vibrated against one another. I’d made them soft and rubbery so they wouldn’t hurt anyone. But it would take a while for them to dissipate. The room would be useless for any more games of Kick the Bubbles. At least for a while.
    “Miss Pond, you agreed to be tested.”
    “I know, and now I’m done with testing. I don’t recall this being anything other than voluntary on my part.”
    “You’re acting like a child. We have only just begun to discover the true range of your power.”
    I glared at the one-way mirror. I couldn’t see Dr. Pendergast, but I could imagine the patronizing look on his face. That and how he would stroke his Vandyke when he was trying to “reason” with you.
    “Yeah, well . . .” Crap, I always sucked at pithy-line moments. “You’re not the boss of me.” I marched out with my pants hitched up, trying not to smack myself on the forehead.
     

     
    There was a knock on my door. They were lodging me in one of the