Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (31 page)

“There he is!” someone shouted. It might not
have been Mr. L. Right, and Michael might be a super-telepathic
Active inside, just bursting at the seams.

Life wasn’t fair. If it was any consolation,
he was surrounded by the oldest people in town. This was really
kind of cruel, when you thought about it. What kind of monster made
old ladies with walkers climb up to the nosebleed section on
arthritic knees and bad hips?

Michael got more of the wire, flipped the
camping lighter upside down, and started winding it around the only
nozzle within reach. It was instantly hot, like blistering hot,
above the lighter and he nearly dropped the whole thing before it
was fixed on the fire suppression nozzle. He’d just finished with
it when a sea of hands came out to snap him up off his feet.

Mr. L smelled like old people. In actuality,
he knew now it was the smell of coffee that had been burned and
saturated and drip-dropped into coffee pots for generations. Still,
coffee or not, he smelled awful, and he was almost close enough to
bite.

“There he is, ladies and gentlemen, the cause
of all our problems here today!” Mr. L shouted.

“I’m not even going to tell you how really
stupid you are, kid,” Terrance Jackson said from not far off. He
looked halfway to becoming a duct tape mummy in his wheelchair.
“Someone says get out, so you sneak
in
. He sneaks in!” He
started laughing, then grimaced and cried out.

“Quiet, peanut gallery.”

“Where’s Charlotte?” Michael demanded. He had
no idea where the bravery was coming from, since his body felt like
one big sweaty block of ice.

“Touching,” Mr. L said, basting him with
coffee breath. “I think you should be more worried about
yourself.”

A sudden burst of inspiration hit him. “You
told my grandfather to substitute in the note from Charlotte.”

Mr. L just smiled. “I knew you were going to
cause me trouble, kid, just as soon as that lightning kid failed to
kill you. But like I said, you shouldn't be worried about any of
that.”

“Why? Because you’re going to talk at me for
another twenty minutes, and I’m going to disappear just like last
time?”

Cold rage glinted in Mr. L’s eyes. A bright
hot spear of pain erupted somewhere in the back of Michael’s
skull.

“Pain’s the first thing you learn when you
steal Mr. Jackson’s power,” Mr. L said. “It’s the only trick that
works on you telepaths.”

He tried not to scream out, and failed.

“Now you’re going to die, but you know what,
I want you to watch this first. Bring her over here!”

Michael’s chin was gripped painfully, and he
was lifted up by his head until he could see his mother. She looked
like she was paying for all of Michael’s mistakes while he’d been
gone.

“Don’t,” Michael said.

“Or what?” Mr. L suddenly screamed. “Who’s
going to ride in here and stop me? Your dad going to suddenly come
bursting through the door with the Alphas? How long you think
they’ve got before I have all of them? They don’t even know what’s
going on here. They’re too busy fixing the problems of the
baselines, Michael, to care about what happens to their own sons
and daughters. Look how easily this place fell apart. Look how many
of us it took to blow down this house of straw.”

He stretched out his hand toward Michael’s
mother, and Susanna shrieked. Michael had never heard her make a
sound like that. It was something out of a horror movie, only real
and five feet away. It hurt his ears, but more than that it hurt
his guts.

“Stop it!” he screamed.

“No,” Mr. L said, and to Michael’s amazement,
the scream got worse. “You don’t make a fool of me and then strut
around gloating about it.”

Michael looked up at the blackened nozzle,
high up above the heads of the town’s old folk.

“Actually,” Michael said, “I do.” As Mr. L
followed Michael’s gaze up to the ceiling, Michael pulled a three
by five note card from his pocket and showed it to Mr. Jackson,
just out of sight of the furious Mr. L. His face registered
confusion, and then shock moments before the whole place went
periwinkle.

Michael had been through so many fire drills
in his young life that he could probably stop, drop, roll, and then
head out of school even in his sleep. Fire was nothing to play
with, this he knew. He believed it. Every single story he read on
his e-reader had the bad guys burning something down, or burning
the building the good guys were in. And authors, he knew, did not
lie.

He wondered if that made him a bad guy. One
second the gym was just an HQ for Mr. L’s Omega Syndicate invasion
force, the next it was a purple-tinted winter wonderland.
Periwinkle foam started to cover everything, shooting down from
dozens of the metal nozzles in the ceiling. Everybody was certainly
surprised, and nobody more than Archibald Lansing, arch-villain.
Before anybody moved, the periwinkle foam was ankle deep and
rising.

Michael wanted to be finished with the whole
thing. He was tired of being frightened out of his mind, he was
tired of people holding him, and most of all, he was tired of being
in pain. His dad’s bike hadn’t been nice to his legs. Those holding
him weren’t at all gentle about gripping his arms. But there was
still a lot to do.

Like, first, he had to stomp on these two
peoples’ feet. He didn’t know them, and felt bad about it. They
were only following orders, and now they were going to get in
trouble.

Both of them squawked out, one after another,
but only one of them let go of his arm. The other held on even
tighter, and started shaking him. He was about to add whiplash to
the list of offenses in this whole thing. That and his plan failing
before step three.

Michael had learned, somewhere in one of his
books (this might have been one of the Artemis Fowl books, but
perhaps not) that a simple plan was most often the best. You get
too complicated, with too many steps, and the thing started looking
like an NFL playbook, and that’s when you were in real trouble.
When too many X’s and O’s started blocking with little arrows, you
were doomed. He’d thought that, with only a couple of real
important steps, this would work. There hadn’t been enough time or
calories in his system to think up a Plan B, or even pay attention
to what would happen if something went really wrong. Well it
had.

Mr. L was roaring in rage. At least, he was
roaring for a few seconds before he took a step towards Michael and
nearly did a flip, slipping on the fire suppressing foam. He went
down heavily and was lost in a sea of pastel purple.

“Trent!” Michael shouted. “Hey Trent, where
are you buddy?”

“Washington?” someone in the crowd said. It
was Davey Rightman, sounding like he’d slept for about two hours
and was just woken up with a bucket of water.

“Davey, get Trent’s fat, useless, ugly
keister out here to fight me. I want my four hundred sixty dollars
back, with interest!” Compound interest was currently confusing him
in math, but he understood the basic concept of it.

“Washington!” came a roar. This wasn’t Mr. L
either. Trent appeared, pushing and shoving people aside. Sparks
leapt from his fingertips. The foam was past knee deep, and people
were slipping and sliding all over the place, bringing each other
down, shouting, purple-covered human dominoes.

Michael was really sorry to do this, but…

“Come on Sparky!” he yelled, then dove
aside.

It was just in time. He didn’t get far with
the man pulling on his arm, but got far enough not to get smashed
with a lightning bolt straight from Trent’s hand. Instead, he got
some volts anyway, even as he hit his chin on the floor and bit his
tongue.

Michael had a pretty good memory when it came
to interesting stuff. He could tell anybody who was interested all
the major events that happened in any of his favorite books, for
instance. He could also recount a lot of the major wars of the
first twenty centuries, about when they were, who was fighting, and
who the winners were.

Most people, he knew, just saw lines on maps.
Most people also just saw metal nozzles sticking out of the
ceiling, if they saw anything at all. They didn’t remember when the
fire department guys came in with their axes and Jaws of Life and
fire hoses, and set a sample house on fire just outside LADCEMS,
then explained all about the properties of the chemical foam fire
suppression system used throughout the school system. It was the
next fact that most forgot: in addition to being the newest and
latest in fire suppression technology, the foam was solidified with
other chemicals and used in electrical cables, because it conducted
electricity extremely well.

The confused screams of over two thousand
people rang out as they were instantly electrocuted. It wasn’t
long, and it wasn’t extremely powerful, but even through the pain
Michael was worried about Grandpa’s ‘ticker’, and the tickers of
all the other old folks who might have caught some of the bolt.

It worked. It only took getting struck by
lightning, but it worked.

Michael jumped to his feet, and instantly
wished he hadn’t. He was pain all over. Somewhere in the mass of
purplish foam pool was Mr. L, and somewhere else was Mr. Jackson.
Michael couldn’t be sure that Mr. Jackson had seen the card, and he
couldn’t be sure that Mr. L lost the telepathy power. The fire
department had said something about just how many gallons of gel
were pumped out of the nozzles, and they might have mentioned how
much foam that instantly changed into, but he was shaky on his math
and didn’t know how long the foam would last.

He wanted to shout to everybody, to get out,
but everyone was moaning and groaning. With any luck, the doctors
from BH Obama would stroll in at the sound of screaming and start
getting everybody out of there. With even more luck, people would
be shocked out of whatever stupor Mr. L had put them in, but
Michael wasn’t going to count on luck starting now. He had to find
Mr. Jackson and put an end to this.

Moving through the gym now was like trying to
swim across Niagara Falls. Everywhere someone wasn’t lying on the
ground waiting to be tripped over, there was someone’s foot to step
on instead. Now the zombie shoes were on the other feet, as Michael
shuffled like a blind man toward the place where Mr. Jackson had
been.

Michael heard a door creak open, and stared
over the chest deep foam at Mr. L’s smirking, disappearing face. He
had to get Mr. L, had to put him down, had to blindfold him right
after knocking him out. There was no other option. That’s how the
plan had ended in the first place, and that’s just how it was going
down.

“Mr. Jackson?” he called. “Mr. Jackson!”

“You are an idiot, Washington,” came the
groaning reply.

“Just stay down, okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll just drown in your…your plan,
shall I? The day I follow the orders of a seventh grade student is
the day I wake up and heaven’s kicked me out for bad behavior.”

“Don’t let him see you!” Michael shouted, as
he ran out the door.

Mr. Jackson was in the midst of saying
something sarcastic when Michael hit the door at full speed and
sprinted out of the school. The cold smacked into him like one of
Trent’s lightning bolts. He hadn’t realized that the foam had
started to soak into his clothes. The wind cut into him like his
jacket and pants were made of tissue paper. His breath went out of
him in a steamy rush. The pain of the bolt of lightning returned,
and he gasped out loud with the sudden agony in his legs from all
that bike riding. And jumping recklessly in the library. Oh, and
the rest of him: ow.

Mr. L wasn’t far off. He had several sets of
wireless door openers and keys, and was randomly unlocking doors,
laughing quietly to himself.

“You aren’t getting out of here!” he tried to
shout. Wheezed actually. Hey, it was the best he could do. He
slipped on the fresh snow, wrenched himself trying to stay upright,
and steadied himself.

“A kid,” Mr. L was saying, in between his own
personal laughter. “A snot-nosed little twerp. Unbelievable.”

Finally one of the cars nearby blinked its
lights and bleeped, and Mr. L started to make a beeline for it.
Michael drew himself up.

“Stop right there!” he barked. To his
surprise, Mr. L did just that. Maybe he was psychic.

“You’re like a festering boil!” Mr. L said.
“Go away kid.”

Michael didn’t even know what that was, but
resolved to look it up on his e-reader after this was over. Instead
of saying something clever, he settled for, “No,” then: “Where’s
Charlotte?”

“The Mr. L wannabe? Oh, I killed her. Oh, Oh,
but don’t worry, she didn’t scream. Much.”

If Michael could have developed his super
power right then and there, he would have killed Mr. L with his
laser eyes. He’d never really wondered what a super hot, exploding
head would look like before, but he was willing to try right now,
just in case it happened for real.

“My work here’s done,” Mr. L told him.

“What are you talking about? Trent just
electrocuted everybody. Half are unconscious and the other half are
rolling around in pain. Plus you don’t have Mr. Jackson’s power
anymore.”

Mr. L laughed. “So what? You think I need it
now?”

“You can’t tell the Actives what to do.”

“Sure I can,” Mr. L said. “They’re
programmed, understand. You think you won this? You better get
yourself some seriously reinforced body armor, kid. I wasn’t
sitting on my hands while you and your girlfriend made up your
little plan. I just planted about five hundred time bombs in
peoples’ heads.”

Michael had nothing to say to that. He just
stared, then glanced back at the gym as if it was going to start
exploding any second. Mr. L chuckled again.