Hannah and the Hitman

Chapter 16

16

HANNAH

Hi

I got the text and wondered who it was from, then shrugged it off as spam. Scammers were getting better and better these days with their creative texting to get someone to reply. I’d fallen for the I’m-your-friend scam once and received so many texts about winning an electric drill set, I’d wanted to switch phone numbers.

So I blocked it and went back to work. At a tap at the front door, I looked up laminating a book at the workstation in the back room. Dan, the mailman, held two boxes stacked one on top of the other and gave me a little finger wave from his grip at the bottom. I saw him every day on his route, and we’d gone to high school together.

I went around the desk and opened the door for him.

“Hey, Hannah. Take the top one, will you? ”

The way he was struggling, they looked heavy. Before I could tell him I was a weakling, he leaned his upper body forward to tip the top box toward me.

I reached out automatically to catch it. “Whoa, okay, um… huh. I got it.”

By the heft of it, the box was full of books. Peeking at the address label, it was from one of the book distributors we ordered from, and they packed well. No fluff only neatly arranged hardback books. Heavy ones, like my boxes from the romance convention.

Adjusting my hands on the bottom for a more comfortable grip, I handled it as if it was full of feathers.

“Wow, Hannah,” Dan commented. “Taking up weightlifting?”

I raised the box up and down a few inches. Up. Down. Up. Down. Easy. Even easier than the box I carried up to my apartment. “Um, I guess.”

“Then if that’s not too bad, here’s the other. Mind taking both?” One box was one thing, but two? “I’m behind and I’ve taken over a second route since someone’s out sick. I need to get everything delivered because we’ve got our first birthing class tonight.”

His wife, Marnie, was expecting their first child in the fall.

“No, wait, I don’t think–”

He set it on the other one so I could barely see over the top edge. “Oh boy. Um…”

My arms hadn’t ripped from their sockets.

My back wasn’t breaking.

What the hell was going on?

“Got it?” he asked, checking to make sure I was good .

I met his worried gaze over the top edge of cardboard. He could’ve carried the boxes across the room and set them on the counter and I should have been upset he was bailing on me, lugging a heavy load. But it actually wasn’t heavy, which was crazy. Dan was sweating with the exertion.

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said, surprising not only Dan, but myself.

I sure as hell didn’t lift weights.

He waved and headed out, practically sprinting down the walk. I turned and went around the desk and into the back room, setting the boxes on the counter, then placed them side by side. I scoped the shipping labels, noted the weights. Thirty-eight pounds. Thirty-two pounds.

What the hell? Since when could I lift heavy boxes? Since when could I break my favorite mug with only a little squeeze of anger? Since when could I rip a bathroom door off its hinges? I raised my arm and bent it like I was trying to make a Popeye muscle. Gave the bicep a finger squeeze with my other hand. No change. Just my usual arm. A little muscle and a whole lot of flab.

Something was up and I had no clue what it was. I wasn’t sure if I should be scared or not. Was this a tumor thing? I felt fine and being able to lift heavy things made things better, not worse. The doctors had said there would be some lingering side effects after my gamma knife radiation, and I’d had a few they listed, like headaches or sleepiness, but not one of them mentioned randomly growing ridiculously strong.

I needed to test this further. I spun around the room looking for something heavy. I went to the loaded down, squeaky wheeled cart that had been pushed to the inside of the doorway. The teenaged volunteers hadn’t reshelved today, so it was loaded of books.

With my hands on my hips, I studied it and muttered, “There’s no way I can lift this. I’m just losing my mind.”

Still… I had to know. Squatting down, remembering the lift with your back concept, I set my hands on the smooth metal side walls of the cart, palms pressing in. Holding my breath, I expected to wrench a few muscles and sweat a little, breathing hard like I was the one in birthing class. No way the cart would raise an inch.

Except it did move. I lifted that thing right off the floor until I stood tall. Then I put it right down. Not because it was heavy, but because it wasn’t.

Quoting Brittany, I said to the cart, “What the actual fuck?”