Chapter 3: Testing the Limits
POV: Marcus
Three days of practice in abandoned warehouses, burned hands, nosebleeds, and one existential crisis later, Marcus had learned three fundamental truths: doors required touching surfaces, the Death Note demanded information he didn't possess, and godlike power felt remarkably similar to chronic pain.
The warehouse district sprawled along Albuquerque's industrial spine like a graveyard of rust and broken dreams. Perfect for testing supernatural abilities without witnesses. Marcus chose a different building each day, using bolt cutters acquired from a hardware store to access spaces where screaming wouldn't attract attention.
Day one had been disaster. He'd managed three doors before collapsing, blood streaming from his nose onto concrete that probably hadn't been cleaned since the Clinton administration. Each door felt like someone driving railroad spikes through his skull, and the destinations were random—sometimes the wall opposite, sometimes a spot six inches to the left.
Day two brought understanding. The power responded to intention, but only if he'd physically been to the target location. He could create a door to the pharmacy because he'd worked there for months. He could reach his apartment because he slept there every night. But trying to open a portal to Jesse Pinkman's house, a place he'd only seen on television, resulted in nothing but scorched palms and disappointment.
Now, day three, Marcus pressed his hand against the warehouse's eastern wall and concentrated. Heat built under his skin, that familiar electric sensation that preceded the impossible. A rectangular outline appeared, glowing soft blue in the industrial gloom.
The door opened to reveal his childhood bedroom in Colorado Springs, exactly as he'd left it twenty years ago. Star Wars posters on the walls, model airplanes suspended from fishing line, a twin bed with a Denver Broncos comforter that his mother had refused to replace.
Marcus stepped through, his feet silent on carpet he'd once known by touch. The house was empty—his parents had moved to Florida after his college graduation, this Marcus's parents or the other's, the memories blurred together now. But the smell remained: his mother's lavender potpourri and his father's pipe tobacco, embedded in the walls like ghosts.
On the dresser sat a photo he'd forgotten existed: eight-year-old Marcus grinning gap-toothed at the camera, arms wrapped around a golden retriever named Buster. The dog had died when Marcus was twelve. The boy in the photo had no idea that death was coming, that everything he loved would eventually crumble to dust.
"Different life," Marcus whispered to the empty room. "Same ending."
The door stayed open for exactly ninety seconds before slamming shut, leaving him stranded eight hundred miles from Albuquerque. It took him three attempts and a splitting headache to recreate the portal home.
By late afternoon, Marcus had mapped his limitations with scientific precision. Range: approximately two hundred feet, possibly extending with practice. Duration: ninety seconds maximum before the doors closed automatically. Frequency: eight doors before his body rebelled with migraines and nosebleeds. Destinations: only places he'd physically visited, stored in some cosmic catalog of spatial memory.
Limited, yes. But still powerful enough to revolutionize any criminal enterprise foolish enough to trust him.
The pharmacy's fluorescent lights buzzed like dying insects when Marcus arrived for his shift. Lisa barely looked up from her magazine, a gossip rag filled with celebrities whose names he'd forgotten in the transition between worlds.
"You look like hell," she said without raising her eyes.
"Thanks. You really know how to make a guy feel special."
"I'm serious. You getting enough sleep? You've been weird lately."
Marcus busied himself with inventory, counting pills that would soon fuel the meth epidemic consuming Albuquerque like a slow cancer. Pseudoephedrine, lithium batteries, drain cleaner—all the ingredients Walter White would eventually use to build his empire of poison.
Through the store's windows, Marcus watched the parade of addiction play out in real time. Three men loitered by the dumpster, their conversation too quiet to hear but their purpose obvious. Inside, customers browsed the aisles with the focused intensity of people shopping for crime instead of convenience.
A woman approached the counter, her skin gray and stretched too tight over her bones. She requested four boxes of pseudoephedrine with the careful pronunciation of someone who'd rehearsed the words.
"ID, please," Marcus said.
She handed over a driver's license that might have been genuine. Sarah Chen, age 28, address in the northeast heights that was probably fake. Behind her, two more customers waited with identical requests and identical dead eyes.
Marcus processed the transactions mechanically, watching poison flow through his hands into a city that was already drowning in it. Each sale brought someone closer to addiction, someone closer to death, someone closer to becoming the kind of person who'd rob a pharmacy at gunpoint for one more fix.
During his break, Marcus sat in the parking lot and opened the Death Note. The pages remained blank except for the rules written in flowing script across the first few sheets. Simple instructions for ending human life with the stroke of a pen.
He could write every dealer's name he'd seen tonight. Sarah Chen and her accomplices, the men by the dumpster, the dozens of others who'd parade through before dawn. All it would take was names, faces, and ages—information he could gather with his door-opening ability and a few hours of detective work.
Clean up Albuquerque in a single night. Wipe the slate clean before Walter White ever learned to cook.
But then what? Remove the street-level dealers and the cartels would send replacements. Kill the suppliers and new ones would emerge to fill the vacuum. Addiction didn't die with addicts—it was a hydra that grew new heads faster than he could cut them off.
"Besides," Marcus thought, staring at the notebook's pristine pages, "what gives me the right?"
He wasn't a hero. He was just a guy who'd died in a car crash and woken up with impossible knowledge and powers that came with migraines. The kind of person who spent his nights selling ingredients for meth production and his days planning murders with supernatural weapons.
But maybe that was exactly the kind of person this world needed. Someone unencumbered by heroic delusions or moral certainty. Someone who could make the hard choices without losing sleep.
Marcus clicked his pen and began writing, not names but rules:
Rule One: Only those who have crossed the innocence threshold. No addicts, no desperate parents, no children forced into the game.
Rule Two: Only when certain of guilt. Absolute certainty, not suspicion or reputation.
Rule Three: Only as last resort. When no other option exists to prevent greater harm.
The Grey Code, he decided to call it. A framework for divine judgment administered by someone who wasn't divine and probably wasn't qualified for judgment. But it was better than nothing, and nothing was the alternative.
Marcus closed the notebook and returned to work, serving customers who might be criminals or might be victims or might be both. The distinction mattered less than he'd thought it would.
Inside the store, a teenage girl browsed the candy aisle while her mother bought drain cleaner and matches. The girl couldn't be older than sixteen, still had that soft roundness that spoke of innocence and hope. She selected a bag of gummy bears with the careful deliberation of someone who knew it might be her last normal purchase for a while.
Marcus tried to remember Breaking Bad's timeline, searching for clues about what came next. Walter's cancer diagnosis in February—that was concrete. Tuco's death sometime in late 2008. Jane's overdose in April 2009. But the spaces between those events were fuzzy, fragmented like a half-remembered dream.
He could recall entire conversations word for word, could visualize scenes with perfect clarity, but the chronology escaped him. Dates shifted when he tried to pin them down. Minor characters faded from memory even as major plotlines remained crystal clear.
"Memory is funny," Ryuk's voice echoed from behind the pharmacy counter, invisible to everyone but Marcus. The death god materialized gradually, like a photograph developing in reverse.
"Sometimes we forget things for a reason."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Maybe some knowledge is too dangerous to keep. Maybe forgetting protects you from the temptation to play god."
"I thought you wanted me to play god. Isn't that why you gave me the notebook?"
Ryuk grinned, those yellow eyes reflecting the fluorescent lights. "I gave you the notebook because it's fun to watch humans destroy themselves with power. But you're different. You're not destroying yourself fast enough."
The death god faded back into invisibility as Lisa emerged from the back room, leaving Marcus alone with questions that had no comfortable answers.
At 3 AM, Marcus locked the pharmacy and drove home through empty streets. In his apartment, he sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and began making lists:
People to save: Walter White Jr. Skyler White Holly White Jesse Pinkman Hank Schrader Marie Schrader Jane Margolis Gale Boetticher Andrea Cantillo Brock Cantillo
Events to prevent: Jane's overdose Plane crash (167 deaths) Hank's murder Gale's murder Andrea's murder Drew Sharp's murder
People who might need killing: Tuco Salamanca The Cousins (Marco and Leonel) Jack Welker Todd Alquist Lydia Rodarte-Quayle Possibly Walter White Possibly Gustavo Fring
The second list was longer than the first. That should have bothered him more than it did.
Marcus folded the paper and tucked it into the Death Note's pages. Tomorrow he'd begin the real work of reshaping a timeline that seemed determined to drown itself in blood and poison. Tonight, he'd try to sleep without dreaming of the faces he might need to erase.
Outside his window, Albuquerque stretched toward the horizon like a circuit board of lights and shadows. Somewhere in that maze of streets, Walter White was sleeping peacefully, unaware that cancer was already growing in his lungs. Jesse Pinkman was probably high, cooking meth in an RV that would soon become the foundation of an empire built on suffering.
Marcus closed his eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to be powerless. The sensation was already fading, replaced by something that felt suspiciously like anticipation.
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