Chapter 54
“Bautista, would you mind giving me a minute with my stepson before you take him?” Hank asked, his eyes still trained on Emmett. “We’ve got a bit of catching up to do.”
“Be careful,” Bautista said, tightening his grip on the gun. “He could be dangerous.”
“What’s going on?” murmured one of the other officers, clearly confused. Bautista shushed him.
Hank stepped forward, striking fear through Emmett like a bolt of frigid lightning.
Instinctively he stumbled back through an X of caution tape, bumping against the balcony railing with a creak of iron.
Only partially bolted to the deck, it tilted back over the side of the tower with Emmett’s full weight against it.
His head jerked around, apprehending the nearly two-hundred-foot drop.
Lizette and Joanna stared up horror-stricken from the courtyard below.
The railing lurched threateningly beneath him as he continued to pile on weight. He struggled to push himself back to his feet.
“Lemme help you—”
“Get away from me!”
Hank lowered his outstretched hand. Emmett expected to find anger in his expression, at the very least cruelty.
Not sadness.
Not regret.
“I don’t blame you for being afraid of me, sport. Hating me. What I did—”
“You tortured me,” Emmett spat.
“You were killing yourself. Your mom too, feeding you to death. Would it have been kinder to do what she did: let you destroy your health, ruin any chance you might have at a happy life?”
“At least she tried. At least she loved me.” Emmett looked back to her, guilt squeezing his thumping heart. He wanted to run down and take her in his arms. Tell her it wasn’t her fault, or maybe, I forgive you. Even now, he wasn’t sure which.
The comingling of his anger and despair seemed to reawaken the Obexity in his veins; a hot prickle started in his stomach, a crackle like carbonation under his skin. His sides undulated outward, bursting through the seams of his hoodie.
“What you did—” Emmett rasped. “I was only a kid!”
“I wish I could take it back, sport. I hope you know that. What I did was unforgivable. My daddy… he was a tough man. He taught me that man’s physical body is a gift from God, and keeping it healthy is how you honor Him—a lesson he was willing to impart with his bare hands when I strayed too far from the Word of Wisdom.
I hated him. Abandoned him and the Church once I turned eighteen, but there are some things a person can’t leave behind. Some lessons you can’t unlearn.”
Tears sparkled in Hank’s eyes, for once absent of any dramatic overtures. No getting down on his knees, no begging for another chance.
The railing lurched again, the last bolts holding it in place threatening to pop free. Seeing Emmett in imminent danger, Bautista holstered his gun. “I’m coming to help.” Another officer stepped forward to assist. Emmett allowed them, proffering his arm for them to pull.
It took both of them, leveraging all their weight against him, to haul him up to his feet.
He staggered, doubled over, and clutched the wall for support. The officers retreated behind Hank, arming themselves again.
“I’m glad we have a chance to do this, sport. I’ve been wanting to say all this for years. I tried reaching out, but…”
Emmett remembered the message from lacrosse_dad71.
Hope you can find it inside your heart to forgive me for everything that happened.
“You need to know I’m not the same person I was.
After you and your mom left, everything changed.
I changed. I know you think I left cancer research because no one would hire me.
Yeah, I saw what you wrote on Instagram, and good thing I did or I wouldn’t have known to find you here.
But that’s not why I changed fields. The truth was, I had a new calling. ”
“Taking advantage of fat people?”
By now Emmett was twice the size he’d ever been naturally. His legs bulged with great, scaly, tumorlike sacs, splitting his pants down the sides.
“First I tried to teach you the right way to eat. Then I tried to shame you into it. You refused to learn, and I’m not gonna lie, it irked me.
Why couldn’t you just make good choices?
Why wouldn’t you just listen like I listened to my daddy?
That day in the garage, I thought I taught you a lesson you’d never forget, but when I saw you a few months later—when you and your mom came by the house to pick up the last of your stuff—you were even bigger than before.
After what I did to you, you still couldn’t stop eating.
“I thought, This can’t be greed. There’s got to be something more to this.
I started to read up on obesity, how it changed the way your body converted energy.
Low-calorie diets had altered your brain chemistry, made you obsess about food like you were starving.
The processed foods your mother fed you had your satiety signals going haywire.
Biologically, environmentally, you were set up to fail.
For all my good intentions, I’d only been making it worse.
“I decided I needed to do something to help—not just you, but the whole country. Needed to find a solution that would allow people to shed fat fast. Not a diet—those don’t work, it turns out. A miracle solution. I set out to create Obexity.
“Allegiant University seemed to share my vision, so I moved to Orange County and started the Center for Obesity Research and Innovation. With Blount as my inspiration I followed new avenues of biological study, some never visited before and some older. Ancient remedies lost to time. But the dean would only let me take things so far. When the Institutional Review Board raised the alarm on my methodology, I left to start my own company.”
With yet another explosion of fat, the final seams of Emmett’s hoodie burst, reducing the garment to a sheet of cotton sliding down his body. Tears of humiliation stung his eyes; he clutched the fabric against his chest, stretching it across his pendulous breasts.
“It was useless until my former student Jenni Saito agreed to join me. I needed someone who not just understood the science, but had lived it. Her insights, informed by her own experiences, were just what I needed. Together, we discovered the perfect solution: EmaC-8. A formulation that, when combined with a modified genetic composition, sent the human metabolism into overdrive. Not even an appetite as massive as yours could keep up, as your success shows.”
“It’s no coincidence that I’m in the trial, is it,” Emmett said. What was it Saito had said? Dr. Smith’s taken a special interest in you. He hand-selected you to participate. “You targeted me with that promoted ad. You wanted me to come along to that information session.”
“Consider it an act of charity. If anyone was going to benefit from Obexity, you should be one of the first.”
“It made me a murderer!” Emmett shouted, his voice an open wound.
“And I don’t relish that. But maybe it’s worth it. More than three hundred thousand Americans die from obesity every year. Aren’t those lives worth just as much as the ones you took?”
Emmett bridled. Who was Hank to lecture him about the value of fat lives? By his own admission, he had no idea what it was to live one.
“You’re a monster,” Emmett said.
“Call me what you want. Obexity is the future. A hundred million fat Americans imprisoned in their bodies, and Jenni and I hold the key. Just as soon as we fix one small problem. She assures me we’re well on our way.”
“No.” The word flew from Emmett’s mouth like something ripped out of him, taking a pound of flesh with it.
Hank’s smile twitched into a sneer. “Come again, sport?”
“Fat isn’t a prison,” Emmett rasped. “It’s not—not something you can just walk away from. Maybe not for everyone”—Lizette, for example, who’d never let her size define or limit her—“but for some of us, fat is who we are.”
It was for Emmett. He understood that now: More than just the weight he carried on his body, it was the weight he carried in his mind.
A scar scored into the tender flesh of his heart by a thousand daily hurts, both real and perceived.
The part of his brain that never let him accept that he was thin even when the bones protruded through his skin, and that told him to clear his plate even when he wanted to throw up.
Like his nationality, sexuality, and the color of his skin, fat was a crucial part of his identity, regardless of the number on the scale.
Even on Obexity he couldn’t escape it, any more than he could escape his own soul.
“Don’t give up on yourself,” Hank said. “You can break free if you just put your mind to it. Take down the post. Write it off as a mental break, like the one that drove you to kill those people. We can get you back on Obexity once we’ve posted bail.
Take the fall for the murders, and you can be one of us. ”
Emmett shook his head as his bones creaked under his compounding heft. His legs quaked, threatening to snap underneath him; he hugged the wall for support.
“I don’t want to be like you,” he said, tears leaking from his eyes. His ballooning fat blasted through the final scraps of his clothing, leaving him naked but for a few shreds of fabric trapped between his folds.
“This,” he said, and raised his voice to a vengeful shout. A war cry. “This is the true me!”
He pushed off the wall and charged, shaking the viewing deck with each thunderous step.
The police unleashed a round of bullets: Pop! Pop-pop! They pierced his skin but couldn’t penetrate deeply enough to wound. He grabbed Hank and threw him aside like a toy, a Pokémon in a plastic ball. Hank, I choose you!
Hank rolled across the deck and hit the balcony railing.
He struggled to push himself up, blood dribbling from a gash in his forehead.
A bullet whizzed past Emmett’s head, blasting a hole in the wall.
He wheeled toward the shooting cops. His footfalls pounded the deck as he barreled at them.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The police scattered like lab rats.
Glistening with blood, Emmett grabbed Bautista by the shirt and hurled him into another, sending them both tumbling down the spiral stairs.
Turning, he seized an arm pointing a gun at him and snapped it in half like an oven-fresh baguette, savoring the crunch of bone almost as much as the screams.
Across the deck, Hank was clutching the balcony railing, dragging himself unsteadily to his feet. Emmett ran at him.
“NO!” he shouted as Hank attempted to dart under his arm.
Emmett twisted, snatching the back of his shirt. He had him—
Pop-pop-pop! Bautista, taking aim from the spiral stair, buried three bullets in Emmett’s chest.
He stumbled back, breathless. His heart pumped blood down his belly like a flow of crude oil before his heel struck the base of the railing.
Emmett still had Hank by the shirt as he pitched backward, realizing with a flash of horror that there was no floor left to catch him.
He twisted in midair and began to plummet. At some point he let Hank go—too soon or too late, he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was the feeling of free fall. Wind rushing past his ears. The momentary bliss of pure weightlessness.
The road rising up, as vast as the ocean, to welcome him home.
This time, no one would stop him from making a splash.