“Yeah?” Vaughn looked mildly annoyed. “Cassie’s right. That is messed up. Remember that lecture of Mr. Beacham’s? The one where he compared supers to some kind of medieval warrior class?”
Everybody in our high school knew about that lecture. I’d felt that it had been over-hyped at the time.
It seemed more insightful now. (more…)
“Great,” Cassie said, “Is he a Nazi too?”
“Dunno,” I said, and tapped away at the computer, heading for the Feds’ supers database.
Vaughn said, “Aren’t you the guy who knows this stuff? You’re on the Double V forums all the time.”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know everything. The Nine keep a low profile. Everybody knows they do stuff because sometimes they take credit for things, but they employ supers, and they’re an organization. So when supers show up, you never know if it’s one of the higher ups or some mid-level guy.”
I watched as our system passed our key, and then got an encrypted response from the other server. When it verified that it came from the Feds, we could assume that we’d logged into the real server instead of some impostor.
A little later, I’d searched out the Nine’s entry. I displayed it on HQ’s twenty foot tall screen. (more…)
On Monday night, Vaughn, Cassie, and I sat together in “Criminology 101.” We weren’t alone. Julie and Shannon were with us.
We sat in a darkened room, looked up at the screen, and watched the professor talk. This would have been normal for a distance learning class except for a few details. First, we were sitting in League HQ. We could have been sitting in a room at the University, but then we’d have been sitting together with Sean, Dayton, and Jody.
It would have been a little awkward for all of us in a variety of different ways. Awkward for me, because Sean and I didn’t get along especially well. Awkward for Cassie and Vaughn, because they were friends of mine and knew Sean. Awkward for Julie and Shannon, because they had been on a team with Sean. (more…)
Isaac turned his head to look down the hall—or so I assumed. The gray wall on my screen could just as easily have been outside.
“That’s a lot of questions, and I’m in the middle of something. We’ll have to make this quick.
In the background a series of baritone horn blasts sounded. An alarm?
“Do you have to go?”
“No. It’s been like this for the last hour here. Let’s try to cover what we can…
Melanie shook her head, “You all heard about that prom, right?”
“I was there,” Courtney said, sounding annoyed.
Michelle, confused, said, “I’m not from here. I’m from Traverse City, so if something special happened, I don’t know about it.”
“You heard about it,” I said. “It’s the one where a guy turned into a monster and attacked people in the gym, and the Heroes League took him out?”
“Oh,” she said, sounding shocked, “that prom. They were talking about it on the news for weeks. That was when people started using that… power juice stuff?”
Right there I guessed that Courtney hadn’t told Michelle that Keith had been the guy who got famous for demonstrating power juice, breaking his arm in the process. I felt sure she wouldn’t thank me for explaining it either.
“No, I didn’t.” I’d been following the whole thing obviously, but not through the news.
Well, a little through the news, but mostly through the Michigan Heroes Alliance’s emails. The various states’ Heroes Alliance groups had come out against it.
Still, I’d originally heard about the change last spring. I wondered what took them so long.
Courtney barely gave me time to finish my sentence. “I thought they’d do something eventually, but not without more warning.”
The next day I sat down to eat breakfast with Jeremy in Hardwick Hall’s cafeteria. My first class was organic chemistry at 9 am—which seemed cruel and unusual punishment given when I went to bed.
“Organic chemistry? Don’t sophomores take that? And it’s supposed to be a hard class.” Jeremy looked up from his cereal. He’d dripped a little milk on his t-shirt.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s only the first week, but it doesn’t seem that bad. I tested out of so much stuff that I’m taking everything out of order.” (more…)
By the time the police took the Nine’s people away in a Box, it was already three in the morning. The fight had taken maybe ten minutes. Answering their questions took most of the time.
We never saw the helicopter that the leader—Cassie’s brother? What do you call someone who was cloned from the same person you were cloned from? Cassie had at least been raised by the original Captain Commando. It made sense if she thought of him as her dad, but for the guy we’d fought, Captain Commando wasn’t much more than an unwilling DNA donor.
Anyway, the Nine’s copter didn’t appear. The News 10 Choppercam did, but unless they were secretly controlled by the Nine, the Nine’s people must have scrubbed their mission.
That’s a long way of saying that by the time the police cars and deep sounds of the Boxes’ diesel engines faded, we’d relocated to the van I’d parked in the alley. (more…)
Lightning hit the leader again, and while his body shook, the paralysis gun dropped out of his hand, falling to the roof with a clunk.
Part of me hoped it still worked by the the time I could move. I planned to grab it. A more practical side of my mind hoped it had been destroyed in the first lightning strike.
Near me, Cassie stood up, entering the edges of the helmet’s peripheral vision. She didn’t waste any time. Once she was on her feet, she ran straight at the leader as he bent over to grab the gun.
He didn’t get up easily. He pushed himself up one hand at a time, swaying as he made it up on two legs.
Taking an experimental step, he spied something on the roof, and bent over to get it—the automatic pistol. When he came up the second time, he seemed stronger. He stood up normally.
Quickly, he pointed the gun past me—probably at Vaughn.
This time the wind came up as a roaring, howling blast that drew the man into the air, and threw him off the building. (more…)
