Pieces of metal dropped out of the air. An engine block landed twenty feet away from me and bounced, smacking into the scrap pile, then bouncing off it and rolling to a stop.
Insulting a guy with magnetic powers in middle of a metal scrap yard might not have been a good idea.
Continue reading Dupes: Part 7
Daniel drove us to HQ and we suited up.
I got into the full Rocket suit because Sean apparently hadn’t realized that the stealth suit was also a Rocket suit at Meijers. I’d told him, but better to make things completely unambiguous if we were going to hunt him down and pretend to be voices of authority.
Continue reading Dupes: Part 6
Haley turned around and started walking back toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“They can’t do that. They don’t have any right to tell us what to do.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “She’ll probably make you turn around again. Or something worse.”
Continue reading Dupes: Part 4
On Saturday morning around 6 a.m., I drove the Ball over to Man-machine’s lair. It was far too early to get up for a Saturday, but it was the best time to go.
Taking the Ball apart turned out to be a bit of a pain. Chris and I kept on discovering new wires and cables to detach from the back of the dashboard, but then we discovered an access panel for the weaponry on the outside of the Ball.
Granted when you’re making weaponry for supervillains, making access panels clear and obvious probably isn’t the highest priority, but I still wished it had been a little higher up on the designer’s list.
Continue reading Dupes: Part 3
I barely got to wonder what the yellow light meant before the phone in my suit rang. The helmet’s readout showed it as being from HQ.
Walking a little bit away from Vaughn, I took the call, talking low into my helmet’s microphone.
“It’s Marcus,” said the voice on the other end. “I went into HQ after work, and you won’t believe it. You’ve already hit pay dirt.”
Continue reading Decisions: Part 8
We spent the next few days bugging the houses and cars of any family members Vaughn thought had connections to his family’s medical interests or worked in medicine.
Giles Hardwick, Vaughn’s grandfather, had had five kids and they’d each had two or three children of their own. Plus, he had a brother and two sisters and they’d had children and grandchildren too. Not all of them stayed in Grand Lake, but by the time we were done on Wednesday night, we’d bugged twenty different people.
Continue reading Decisions: Part 7
I drove Haley to her home, but ended up staying for a couple hours after that.
I left there just before eleven, dropping off the car back at HQ, and making it home on time for curfew. Then I read a book for a few more hours, and went to bed around two in the morning.
I didn’t fall asleep at school the next day, but I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, making me more withdrawn than usual. I took notes, ate lunch by myself, and stayed away from people.
This had one practical result. I didn’t know where any of my friends were going to be after school, making it hard for me to bum a ride home. That wouldn’t ordinarily have been a problem except that it started to rain during the last period, and didn’t stop when school let out.
“You’re going to fucking kill him,” Chris said.
“I was going to be careful. I wasn’t going to hit him against the ground as hard.”
“That’s insane.”
Sean descended from the black sky, landing in front of us. He turned his head to look at Jack floating above the street.
“Do you know how many people that guy killed? I was going to make sure he couldn’t do anything.”
Continue reading Rivalry: Part 16
Sean didn’t have a chance, and I knew it even if he didn’t.
I gave the rocketpack thrust, and aimed myself at Jack. Unfortunately, that was harder than it sounds. When you’re fighting someone who can grab you with his mind, a force field or some other kind of energy, you’ve got a couple choices — charge straight for him so quickly that he doesn’t have time to think, or make a lot of unpredictable turns while moving at an outrageous speed.
Jack went with the latter option, making it hard for Sean to concentrate on him, and for me to grab him.
Continue reading Rivalry: Part 15
Taking control of the direction of the flight didn’t work.
He had directional jets on his arms and legs. I had the rocketpack on my back. After a few moments of struggle, we established that he could change direction more easily than I could, and that tumbling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour made us both dizzy.
I powered down the rocketpack, and decided to concentrate on trashing his suit.
Continue reading Rivalry: Part 14