Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (32 page)

“You’re lying,” Michael said.

“Uh, right, yeah, lying, you got me. Hey
listen,” Mr. L said, that lopsided grin appearing. “I got to admit,
I made a mistake with you. I tried killing you off. I should’ve
offered you a job. That last synergist told me you got something in
you, kid. She said you could really be the big one. Of course your
mom didn’t want to hear that.”

What was he talking about? Michael didn't
bother trying to figure it out. Lansing was only trying to distract
him from doing what he needed to do: stop this overweight lunatic
from getting away.

“So I tell you what. You get in the car, the
whole gym full of purple foam thing: forgotten. The electrocution
thing: forgiven. You come to Omega, we treat you right, you get to
be a king among kings. You can have your own island. A nice island,
where you can have all the little girlies you like, feeding you
tropical fruits and massaging your feet and whatever it is you
twelve year old kids like doing.”

“I’m thirteen!” he snarled.

Mr. L looked surprised, and raised his hands.
“Right, of course. Thirteen. Huge difference. But listen, I haven’t
got much time, need to be away. Want to come along? I can only
promise riches beyond your imaginings, all the time in the world to
do whatever it is you like, pure pleasure, that sort of thing. Eh?
Going, going…”

“Gone,” Michael said savagely.

“Oh!” Mr. L said, clutching at his heart.
“You wound me, Michael. Anyway, that’ll be it. See ya. Good luck in
Bombville, and send my love to your mom and gramps. If they
survive.”

With that, he started up the car, drove out
of the parking lot, and turned the corner. Michael felt a crushing
load of despair shoot through his entire body, helped along by a
generous amount of freezing cold and the pain.

Michael howled in frustration, and slammed
his fist down on the snowy car in front of him. Mr. L was going to
get away. He was going to drive into the sunset. What was Michael
going to get out of this? A fresh headache, probably some burn
treatment, a bit tongue, a twisted ankle from the library, and the
searing anger of watching the car-

Watching the car drive straight into a
tornado.

His dad was home. The elder Michael
Washington, aka Stone to the rest of the world, stood in the center
of the street as a concrete golem. Every bit of his enormous body
was asphalt black, including (Michael knew this from watching on
TV) his hair and eyes. A yellow stripe ran up the center of his
body. His hands seemed even bigger than they normally did, big
enough to palm a compact car at least.

That wasn’t even the most amazing part. Sure,
seeing Stone in action and knowing it was his dad was super
awesome, but the rest of the Alphas were there as well. Around
Stone, some up in the air, some standing around the car, were
Ginger, McKorsky, Kravens, Rajasthan, and, Michael assumed,
somewhere out there was Shadwell, invisible.

Right about now, on TV at least, Stone would
say something like ‘time to take out the trash’ or ‘about time we
cleaned house’, and they would absolutely smash the drug cartels in
Mexico or the opium lords or the arms dealers wherever they were
that month.

Then, generally, McKorsky would roll in some
fog or a hurricane or some tornadoes or something, and the coverage
would get really confusing. You’d see flashes of fire in the
carnage from Ginger. Kravens would be everywhere at once, disarming
everybody, dismantling guns as he went. The cameras would have to
slow down to super slow-mo just to catch a glimpse of his hands
moving, calmly taking the various pieces off at some hundreds of
miles per hour. And Rajasthan would be there, just commentating
while he disrupted the enemy radios or shut down their satellite
feeds. He’d always get into the details of it even though you had
no idea what he was talking about. Rajasthan always made the
smartest people in the world look like grade-school dropouts.

It was always so well done, so beautiful like
they’d done up their makeup for hours and rehearsed all the
difficult parts a few times. They said things that sounded
rehearsed in those powerful, we-are-the-absolute-law-of-the-earth
sorts of voices. It was like watching a comic book happen in real
life, except it was usually over in a few minutes.

But television and real life are very
different things. Michael wasn’t prepared for what happened in real
life.

Mr. L shot out of the car like a bullet,
while somewhere in the distance Ginger dropped to the earth like a
stone. Kravens started running, but Michael realized after a few
seconds that he was just running. Not invisible from the super
speed. He coasted to a stop and looked about confusedly, but
Michael wasn't paying attention. He was staring at Mr. L.

This fat, middle-aged man was doing the
unthinkable: fighting the alphas single-handedly. Mr. L was taking
all their powers in turn.

Not far away, Shadwell appeared. That was
strange enough, in and of itself. Usually you’d just see someone
trip and fall down, or their gun suddenly floating in the air but
really in Shadwell’s hands. On TV, the only time you saw Shadwell
was when the fighting was all over and they were doing a press
conference.

What was even more surprising was when
Shadwell started running toward Stone, only he disappeared. A
second later he’d tripped over a car at hyperspeed. Whatever
hundreds of miles he was going, nobody would just trip. Instead, he
flew through the air, tumbling end over end before he landed on his
face. Then he slid about forty feet. Face first.

Then Stone turned into his dad. The concrete
vanished and he shrank down to his normal size. He let out a howl
of frustration and rage.

“Come out and fight like a man, Omega!” he
shouted. “Command, something's wrong. All our abilities keep
malfunctioning. They keep switching...” He stopped and listened for
a second. From this distance Michael couldn't see the radio going
up to his ear, but he knew it was there. He'd seen Stone enough to
know.

“I won’t do this to you, kid,” Mr. L said
from a few feet away. “I ain’t gonna kill your dad in front of you.
I do have to say though, I've been looking forward to this the
whole time. I haven’t been able to really switch up and give my
power a flex. It’s faster than I thought it would be.”

Michael whirled, but Lansing wasn’t there.
Or, he was, and he was in the middle of stealing Shadwell’s
invisibility.

Half a block away, in the middle of the
intersection Stone burst into flame. He and his son both jumped
back and screamed.

“Relax, relax, he’s not dying,” Mr. L
chuckled. “You should see them all, trying to figure out how to use
each others’ powers. McKorsky is trying not to turn into a tree,
and Ginger’s just turned this snowstorm into a blizzard…but pretty
soon it’ll be a flood if she doesn’t get a handle on it quick.”

“Don’t do this,” Michael croaked. This was
worse than looking at the smoking ruins in Tallahassee. The Alphas
weren’t supposed to be undone by one guy with a beer gut.

“All you have to do is get your power and
stop me,” Mr. L whispered. “Or…you know, maybe I will kill you
after all.”

He appeared a few feet from Michael, sitting
on a big SUV's hood. Kravens saw him, but it was too late. Flame
roared around the super normal Kravens. His dad shouted too, but he
was too far away to get here in time.

“Aww, not so fast!” Mr. L shouted in delight.
“You get to watch your son’s friend get roasted alive.”

He turned back to Michael, and raised a fiery
fist.

And a wolf jumped on him.

Clearly Michael had hit his head and this was
all some sort of bizarre dream. His subconscious had to be taking a
vacation, and left him with some other person’s subconscious. A
gray wolf with electric blue eyes was tugging on Mr. L’s forearm,
snarling and growling.

And then the flames were off. Mr. L staggered
back and produced a very large pistol from somewhere. His left arm
might be bleeding, and the white shirt hanging off in rags, but the
rest of him looked very much alive.

“Let me up Jackson!” Mr. L screamed. “You
know you can’t keep me down. I’ve trained too long for this. I’ve
had that ability for too long…I’ve got my own psychic defenses. Now
gimme!”

“Michael, get down!” Mr. Jackson? How had he
gotten into Michael’s funky Technicolor nightmare? “I can’t keep
him for very long. Charlotte—”

The wolf gave another snarl and leapt. Mr.
L’s arm, trembling before, jerked up and shot the wolf. He threw
back his head and laughed, and then turned the gun on Michael.

“Should’ve taken the job,” he muttered.

Something ripped Michael off his feet and
pulled him onto his back. He turned his head to cry out, because
the wolf wasn’t lying on the pavement a few feet away, Charlotte
was, and she was bleeding. She'd been shot, and the realization hit
him: Mr. L shot her.

Wait, had he been shot? Michael was already
very cold, but now he was shaking.

Mr. L turned back toward Terrence Jackson,
face straining and shining with sweat. “Now…give
me…back…that…beautiful…power…Terrence.”

And that was the end of that dream.

“We are gathered here to put these earthly
remains to rest,” the priest said, “and bear witness to the
departure of the spirit. We gather together, at times like these,
to honor memories. Often times we feel that we can only capture
glimpses of a person’s life, that they are smoke and we can’t hold
on long enough. But the Lord is with us here today, beloved and
friends, He who remembers all, past present and future. We have but
to ask, and we will be rewarded life everlasting.”

“On days like these we are reminded that the
day will come when we, too, will be that smoke slipping through the
fingers of our loved ones, yet we will find ourselves in the
hallowed halls of our Lord. I say this with every confidence,
friends and beloved, we will sit on His comfiest of couches, and we
will have all the time we need to watch every second, if we wish,
on the Lord’s projection television. And, if we like, there will be
plenty of time for reminiscence, for they will be waiting for us
with the lights on.”

The priest went on. And on. He was jovial, in
his way. He was amusing enough, not funny, no, you couldn't have
funny at funerals. But death didn't have to be so heavy. The jokes
lightened it up, brought heaven down to earth for a few seconds,
enough for everyone to find comfort.

“Buck up,” Grandpa said. “Nothin ever so
final as this, and we don't know as it is really the end. Mayhaps
you get downloaded into the Big Fella's collective in the sky when
you go. Or maybe you get started up again in a new body. Would be
nice, you know, tryin' out being a woman.”

Stone, Michael Edward Washington Senior,
nodded. Silvery tears glinted and fell from his eyes. It looked
like he attempted a smile, but it rumpled painfully and
disappeared.

“This ain't the end of the world, Michael,”
Grandpa said. “You still got your boy.”

What was he talking about? Michael was only
thirteen years old. He wasn't going to be having kids for another
ten years at least, and probably never. Michael nodded anyway, and
turned away while Kravens's relatives dropped sad white flowers on
the polished casket.

He hadn't known Kravens well; hadn't known
him hardly at all when you came right down to it. It was the type
of thing you didn't realize until you didn't see his face anymore.
They'd had the laughs, had the drinks outside Saigon, after trying
to salvage something of Gwangzhou, but having drinks wasn't the
same as finding out about the three kids Kravens had back in town.
Why hadn't he known that? Come to think of it, he couldn't remember
Kravens talking about anything except how the world was going bad,
and how tiring it was all the time fixing it. This whole super hero
business wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Maybe he'd get out of
it.

Wait a second, he wasn't even in the super
hero business. He was a seventh grade kid, and he didn't have any
friends except...

“Charlotte!” he screamed, and woke up
thrashing in his hospital bed.

He’d been in a forest of beeping machines and
tubes before, but last time he’d been on some serious,
can’t-lift-arms-and-barely-lift-eyelids sort of medications. That
meant this time, when he jerked awake and started moving around,
all the things sticking in him pulled back, and did they ever
hurt.
Michael didn't feel bad for the words that came out of
his mouth. They seemed like the right way to dull the pain, to spit
it out as acid words. Several nurses came fluttering in, exclaiming
about that rising number or this falling number.

“Where is she?” he demanded. He was also
aware of the bleeding. He was leaking life, and it didn't feel
wonderful.

“She's fine,” the nurses lied. They had no
idea who he was even talking about.

“Where is she, I want to see her!” he
spat.

“Okay, alright,” she lied again. Behind her,
two more nurses were murmuring to each other and filling up a
syringe with something. He wasn't quick enough, his body was still
too heavy, and they had it injected into the tube in his arm before
he could stop them. It wasn't long before medicated sleep snuck up
and pounced on him.

He dreamed of Charlotte's mom, of all people,
and the twins. He hadn't seen them in ages, since Charlotte had
been a prisoner beneath the Marcus Patterson building for so long.
Yet now they swam into view like he was climbing out of a tunnel,
and when he spoke, he had Charlotte's voice.

“I'm okay mom,” he said. Charlotte said.

“Course you are. You're my strongest
girl.”