Then, seemingly apropos of nothing he took out his hip flask.
“You’re drinking?” Annie gasped in disbelief. “At a time like this?”
“I can’t think of a better time for a drink,” he answered with a roguish smile. Then he upended the container and let its contents dribble out onto the floor. When it was empty, he moved cautiously toward the edge of the pool.
The effects of the plasma storm seemed to increase with his approach. A tendril of light reached out and caught the outstretched hand with the flask. The tongue of energy vanished instantly upon contact, but Kismet jerked his hand back and cradled it against his chest.
“Damn thing shocked me,” he muttered, but nevertheless resumed his advance. For a moment, the cave grew dim, as if the jolt had somehow drained the static storm of its power, but after just a few seconds, it started growing brighter again. The brief respite permitted Kismet to reach his goal without being shocked again, and he knelt right next to the water’s edge. Annie, braving the storm, moved to join him.
He cautiously probed the air above the water. Wispy tongues of static reached out to him, dancing at his fingertips, but evidently not with the same intensity as the earlier discharge. He drew back his hand and flexed his fingers, trying to shake the memory of the jolt from them. “Whatever is at work here, it’s powerful.”
Steeling his determination, he held the flask out over the water. The electricity arced into him again, conducting right through the metal of the container, but he resisted the instinctive urge to draw back and instead lowered the flask into the water.
A dull moan escaped his lips as energy began surging through him. A mist of crimson plasma began to swirl around his arm like a veil. Annie reached out instinctively, intending to pull him back, but through clenched teeth he hissed, “Don't touch me.”
Through a sheer effort of will, he drew back his hand and with it a flask full of the potent water. The ferocity of the electricity began to diminish again as he moved away, his muscles still twitching uncontrollably from the shocks. A few tendrils of light clung tenaciously to him for a moment then vanished.
“Are you all right?” she asked. She wanted to reach out to him, but his earlier warning echoed in her mind. Was he now charged with electricity? Would a single touch from him knock her on her ass…or stop her heart?
He looked at her and opened his mouth tentatively, as if unsure that any sound would issue. “I will be,” he croaked.
Then they both stared down at the prize he had retrieved. She extended a cautious and reverent hand toward it, placing her fingers against the metal.
“It tingles!”
He met Annie's stare, as if asking for her approval. She nodded reassuringly. “Do it.”
Kismet raised the flask, as in salute, and then tipped it to his lips.
He felt energy crackle between the flask and his lips, and then the water was in his mouth. There was a faint lingering taste of bourbon, but as the liquid swirled and sizzled across his tongue his ability to perceive even that was overwhelmed. Then the electricity surged through his body, causing the muscles of his extremities to begin twitching uncontrollably. Yet, whereas the static on the surface of the Fountain had been painful, even injurious, the shocks he now felt seemed to revitalize and energize him. He felt the pins and needles of increased circulation in his arms and legs. The liquid, sliding down into his digestive system was like warm liquor in his throat and stomach, and he could feel it passing immediately into his bloodstream. He had taken only a small sip, but the effect was tremendous. His body was alive with energy, his nerves quivering with excitement.
He abruptly felt a profound, gnawing hunger in his belly. The spasms nearly caused him to double over in agony. He groaned a little, and Annie, sensing but not understanding his discomfort, took the flask from his hands and set it carefully on the floor.
She gripped his shoulders. “What's wrong?”
The hunger subsided to a dull throb, but a sense of fatigue quickly replaced it. Kismet felt as if vital energy was being sucked out every pore of his body, drawn down into his core; his muscles felt like jelly.
“Nick, is it the water? Is it poison?”
“No,” he whispered.
No indeed.
Not poison. Not harmful in any way, at least not in the small amount he’d imbibed
He could almost see what was happening. His bone marrow was generating blood cells at an astounding rate. His arteries and veins of his body were swelling to accommodate the invigorated blood supply. He greedily sucked in breaths, charging the newly formed red blood cells with oxygen, and those new cells raced throughout his body, delivering their payload to his cells, which in turn began growing and dividing, healing the tissue that had been damaged by injuries too numerous to count.
The process wasn’t altogether pleasant. Cells used oxygen as a catalyst, but the raw material needed for growth and regeneration was being drawn from his body’s reserves. He didn’t know what would happen once those were depleted.
Something else was happening, too. His nerves were being overloaded with sensation. At first it was a merely an annoying itch, but within seconds, the sensation racked him from head to toe — it was especially intense in his feet. The itch grew exponentially, not just on the surface of his skin, but internally, in his organs and musculature. He could not resist the impulse to begin scratching at the painful sensation. His fingernails were visibly longer than just a moment before, and he dug them into the exposed flesh of his feet.
Annie watched, horrified as the effects became starkly visible. In a matter of seconds, Kismet's hair and nails had grown longer. When he started tearing into the bare skin of his feet, she seized his wrists to prevent him, but then gasped in disbelief at what she saw next.
Under the ragged and bloodstained tatters of his socks, his feet had healed completely. Fresh, pink skin gleamed on the soles of his feet, marred only by red claw marks from his uncontrollable scratching, and even those vanished before her eyes.
The hands she held in her own were also healed. The outermost layer of skin, tattooed with scratches and scars, the physical record of the innumerable deadly encounters he had survived over the past few days, sloughed off like the shed skin of a molting reptile, and beneath it was virginal flesh, as pink as smooth as a baby’s.
Kismet hugged his arm to his chest and clenched his teeth as he rode out the deluge of sensations. He understood now. This was indeed the Fountain of Youth, but it wasn’t magic. When he’d drunk, a chemical message had gone out into his cells, stimulating them to do exactly what they did from the moment life began — create new cells and tissue to replace and repair the old. The only difference was that the water initiated an accelerated version of this process.
The sensory overload reached an almost transcendent peak then began to subside, but he could feel the potency of the Fountain’s water tingling within him. It was still active, but for how much longer?
Annie still held him tight. He slowly unclasped his arms from around his chest, and reached out to return her embrace. “It's all right,” he whispered. “I'm fine.”
He was soaked in sweat, and a chill raised gooseflesh all over his flushed skin, but in every other way, he was perfectly healthy.
Something tickled his forehead, and he reached up to discover that his normally close-cropped hair had become a shaggy mass, a prodigious mane that fell down nearly to his eyes and tickled the back of his neck. A bushy beard had sprouted on his chin and cheeks as well.