by Baron Sord
Meanwhile, Lady Liberty was busy pulling unconscious people from the SUV and moving them to safety. Perhaps I was wasting time with the Impala when I could be helping her—
Ka-BOOM!
The Impala exploded again. Holding it up must’ve shifted the gasoline. I set it down carefully.
Fire pyramid.
Fuel. Heat. Oxygen.
Maybe I could suck up enough air to remove all the oxygen from the fire? Superman had done that a hundred times. Yeah, no. Science said I would have to suck up trillions of cubic meters of air from the vicinity so quickly that the surrounding air in the atmosphere didn’t have time to rush back in and reignite the fire.
Yeah, totally impossible.
But I was going to try anyway.
Facing the fire, I blew all the air out of my lungs, then sucked in violently with all the force I could. Nothing happened to the flames because, duh, my lungs weren’t any bigger than before.
Maybe I could blow the fire out?
Yes, Superman had done that too, but it seemed unlikely for similar reasons. My lungs were too small to create a steady wind. But I tried, pursing my lips into a tight nozzle while exhaling forcefully.
Fwish!
Again, nothing.
The belching flames went on belching, and the bellowing black smoke went on bellowing upward in greasy clouds.
What if I fanned the air with my arms and blew it out that way? May as well try. I spun one arm in a circle as fast as I could. Made Pete Townshend and every other wind-milling guitar player proud. Didn’t do a thing to the fire.
That left removing the heat.
Short of a snow storm in my pocket, or carrying around the frigid vacuum of deep space in a can, the only thing I had on hand to pull heat away from the fire was…
Me.
An idea sprang to mind.
I immediately balked at it.
It was too stupid.
Jumping into the fire would only serve to incinerate me.
Wait.
Would it?
I took a step toward the burning Impala.
Was it just me, or did the flames not feel as hot as I’d thought?
I took another step.
This was incredibly stupid, but so was a green eclipse out of nowhere that somehow made me and Lady Liberty incredibly strong.
I stepped closer, now only five feet away from the flames. They didn’t feel any hotter than a hot day in Vegas. Very hot, but in no way painful.
I lifted my arms, palms facing the flames. I imagined pulling the flames into my hands. Nothing was happening. Duh. Because wishing didn’t pull anything, least of all fire.
Wait. The fire triangle said it wasn’t the flames I needed to eliminate.
It was the heat.
For several moments, I tried to imagine myself somehow collecting the heat that radiated toward me. Nothing seemed to be happening. Perhaps I needed to get closer. Whether you were trying to conduct heat to or from a solid, liquid, or gas, it was all about proximity.
I took another careful step toward the Impala. Now inches away from the flames.
Lady Liberty shouted from the sidewalk. “What are you doing?! You’re gonna burn yourself!”
“I’ve got this!” I shouted back.
Was I nervous about getting burned?
Damn right I was.
But I still wasn’t feeling significant heat. Nothing painful, anyway. I took my final step and thrust my arms dead center into the raging flames.
Anybody could wave their hand over an open flame or a campfire without getting burned. Heck, I and countless others had done it plenty of times. Leaving your hand over the flame would slow roast it. And yet… I wasn’t feeling any pain. Not yet, anyway.
A crazy thought occurred to me.
What if I touched the hot metal of the car? Heat conducted more quickly through a solid touching another solid than a solid touching a gas. Everybody knew grabbing hot logs or a searing hot grill was pure idiocy. Instant third degree burns.
Feeling idiotic, but not too much heat from the fire, I planted my hands firmly on the metal body of the Impala, right on the bubbling and peeling paint.
Winced.
Expected my hands to melt themselves to the metal.
Pulled them away briefly.
Not melted.
Barely any pain, like holding a hot cup of coffee for too long, but not so hot you had to put it down.
I pressed my hands firmly against the scorching metal. Let the heat conduction commence. Felt it rush up my arms in a distinct wave.
The smoke in my face was making my eyes water. I closed them tight. Noticed the toxic fumes from the burning gas and melting paint tickling my nose and throat. Coughed a couple times. Turned my head away to draw a clean breath then held it while I stood there waiting for the fire to go out.
Was this working?
Hard to tell with my eyes closed.
Oddly, I had this vague mental image of heat transferring from the flames and hot car to me. Similar to a thermal camera, hotter things appeared white, yellow, orange, red. Cooler things were greens, blues, purples. In my mind, outside of me, the car, and the fire, everything else appeared black.
Had to be my over-active imagination.
It had gotten me this far, so I gave it free rein. I was a heat vacuum cleaner sucking it all in. I was frickin’ Ice Man from the X-Men. No, colder. I was Arctic ice on the moons of Neptune. No, deep space, where cosmic radiation kept things at a cool 2.7 Kelvin.
I was that cold.
Wait, no I wasn’t.
Not even close.
Every atom in my body was vibrating crazily with heat energy. I could see it in my mind. The intensity was highest at my hands (white), lower in my arms (yellow), lower still in my torso (orange), and lowest in my legs and feet (red). Heat map aside, I definitely felt myself getting hotter and hotter. Impossibly hot. Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four hot.
But it didn’t hurt.
Surprisingly, it felt good.
Talk about “Flame on!”
I opened my eyes in tiny slits, wondering if maybe I was on fire. I wasn’t. But my Star Wars Rock Concert T-shirt was! So were my jeans! And my shoes! Not even the rubber soles remained! They were melted puddles bubbling on the asphalt.
Whoops!
Worse, my iSearch Robot phone was lying on the ground and the screen was burning. I had paid five hundred bucks for that thing!
I tried to stamp it out with my bare foot. It squished underneath. Yes, squished. It must’ve been really hot, but it didn’t burn my foot. Not that it mattered.
My $500 phone was ruined!
My keys lay in a lump next to the Robot phone. Assuming they were molten hot like my phone, I didn’t want to squish them too. Hopefully they would cool if I left them alone.
Somehow, my wallet had survived and lay open not far from my foot. But the cash had fallen half-out and the bills were burning away to nothing. I stamped at them and they billowed into burning embers. There went my cash. I kicked my wallet away from the heat of the car fire, hoping to at least save my credit and ATM cards and driver's license from destruction.
Then I continued drawing heat from the burning Impala. I couldn’t hold much more. I was shaking painfully with energy.
Just one more second…
Still burning.
My pain intensified.
Okay, one more second.
Burning.
Hot.
Hot, hot, hot!
That was it! I had to stop!
Suddenly, a final black cloud belched upward and the flames shrank to nothing.
Somehow, the fire was out.
Incredible.
I shook my head and laughed in disbelief.
The fire pyramid had worked!
Go science!
As for how I had done it? Go magic! Or, as Arthur C. Clarke might say, any sufficiently advanced alien technology that seems like magic!
Whatever the explana
tion, I had transferred the heat of the entire fire into my body. Now I had to do something with it. My body was telling me I’d mainlined a gallon of meth-amphetamine or walked into a nuclear reactor core and started drinking the radioactive cooling water or something equally insane. Logic told me if I didn’t rid myself of the excess heat energy quickly, I was going to explode.
But I had to put the energy somewhere safe.
I looked skyward. That’ll work.
I pointed my arms straight up and let go.
FWOOM!
Jets of flame erupted from each arm at an incredibly high rate of speed.
Speaking of fuel, what was I combusting? The molecules in the air? No. Short of an atomic reaction caused by insanely high temperatures, atmospheric air was essentially stable. Could it be the molecules from my body? That was the only logical explanation. Flesh burned, but that didn’t make sense. How did my flesh combust without me feeling the pain? Or without reducing my hands to bleeding stumps? Or should I say cauterized stumps? Or me burning away to nothing?
Ask Superman. The real Superman, not the one we had lifted the car off of.
It didn’t matter because the proof was combusting high overhead. My twin columns of flame were shooting so high, they were punching through a low-flying cloud drifting by, blowing a hole in the middle of it.
A moment later, my flame columns faded to a flicker, then were gone.
Relief.
The agitation in my body was gone too and I felt totally fine. I smiled to myself. I may have only been a mediocre comic artist and a lackluster software engineer, but I had always had a passion for science and it had just paid off. Thank you, chemistry class!
Lady Liberty gawked at me. “Oh. My. God.”
“Nope,” I grinned. “Doug Moore.”
“You’re naked!”
I looked down. My boxers were gone too!
“Wow,” Lady Liberty grinned, staring right at my package. “Look at you.”
“Would you stop?” I was totally embarrassed and slapped my hands over my junk. I looked around for something better to cover myself with. There! Lady Liberty’s cape lying on the ground where she’d dropped it. I ran to it and wrapped it around my waist.
Luckily, everyone was still asleep and no one but her had seen my junk hanging out.
She looked me over, grinning. “The cape is a good look for you. It shows off your abs.”
“What abs?” When I looked down, I saw an eight pack. Not a sixer. An eighter. When I had woken up this morning, I’d had a oner. “Where did those come from?”
She gave me sarcastic smirk, “I thought you said you didn’t work out.”
“No, I mean, I don’t have abs. I mean, not abs you can see.”
“You do now,” she grinned, still drooling as she sauntered over.
“Would you stop?” I chortled nervously.
“Sorry,” she grinned. “I was just thinking you’d make a good model if I ever need super dude reference.” She reached up and grabbed my bicep. “Look at these arms. And these shoulders. Your body is so hard…” Her hand was caressing my body in a very familiar way.
Familiar as in sensual.
Sensual as in, if she didn’t stop, the rest of me was going to be hard as a rock in less than a microsecond. With the danger from the car fire past and everyone safe, I was intimately aware of how gorgeous Lady Liberty was. It didn’t help she was standing inches away while stroking me all over.
Stroking.
In the bright sunlight, that costume of hers may as well have been invisible. I could see the shape of her breasts perfectly through the material. She wasn’t wearing a bra, her nipples were fricking hard, and it was at least 80 degrees outside.
She damn sure wasn’t cold.
I was a single nanosecond away from pitching an epic tent under her Stars & Stripes flag. I was also acutely aware we were surrounded by several hundred Comic Con attendees who might wake up any second.
“Uhh…” I stammered, “…have you seen my phone anywhere? Or my car keys? Or my wallet?” I spun around, looking for them, one hand clutching her cape around my waist. I had a pretty good idea where my stuff was, but I needed an excuse to stop staring at her costume-covered boobs, which might have grown larger than I remembered. Not that I had looked earlier. Too closely, that is. I had only looked the appropriate amount.
She pointed at the phone-shaped blob of metal and plastic on the ground near the extinguished car fire, “Is this your phone?”
“It was,” I grumbled. Saw my wallet where I had kicked it. Picked it up. The cash had burned to ashes, but my credit card, ATM card, and driver's license were in good shape. That was a plus. “Do you see my car keys? Oh, never mind. There they are.” They had melted into a blob of brass. “Man, how am I going to drive my car home?”
“I can give you a ride,” she winked.
“Wait, what?” It took me a moment to decide what kind of “ride” she meant. Based on her current bedroom expression, it was hard to tell. She probably meant driving me home, but she had been unnecessarily appreciative of my nakedness earlier, to my total surprise. Surprise at both her appreciation and my newly muscular body. And hers. Hers wasn’t necessarily more muscular, not by much, anyway. But it was more perfect than before: not only the size of her breasts, but also the shape (not all breasts were shaped alike), and the proportion of her ribcage to her waist and hips, and the shape of her hips, and her eye-catching thigh gap, and her slender legs, and her—
“Earth to Doug!” She frowned like I was an idiot. “I said I’d drive you home. Drive. Drive, drive, drive.”
Had she just read my mind?
She didn’t need to.
My male brain had taken over and my thoughts were all over my face.
But I was still confused. This morning, she wouldn’t even tell me her name. Now she was offering to drive me home? Who did that? Then again, we had risked life and limb together to save a bunch of total strangers. That was generally a bonding experience.
“What about all these people?” I asked. “What do we do with them? Start waking them up or…?”
“Oh. I hope they’re not dead,” she said, concerned. “We should check their pulses.”
It took us less than a minute to confirm that everyone we checked on the street was simply asleep or unconscious or in a coma. But not dead. That was something.
She sighed, “This is so weird. What put all these people to sleep? And why are we so strong? And how did you do that fire thing?”
I smirked at her, “I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was the space aliens in the green eclipse.”
We both laughed.
Suddenly, all around us, people started waking up.
“Thank God for that,” Lady Liberty said.
I struck my best heroic pose, my fists on my hips. In the deepest voice I could manage, which turned out to be deeper than I remembered, I said, “Our work is done here, Lady Liberty. Back to the Batcave!”
She giggled, “I prefer the Hall of Justice. It’s got better lighting and it’s more spacious. This girl don’t do caves, babe.”
We both laughed again.
I looked at her cyan eyes.
Yeah, this time, we were having a moment for sure.
“Hey,” I said, grinning, “what’s your name, really?”
Her lips eased into a sexy grin, “Come now, Doug. You know as well as I that every super heroine has a secret identity she doesn’t reveal to anybody.”
“True. But you know my name. Fair is fair.”
She was suddenly distracted by the sleepy people in the cars and the bus, who were now opening doors and getting out, looking around and muttering in confusion while wondering what had happened. The crowd on the sidewalk were standing up and brushing themselves off.
“Everyone looks okay,” Lady Liberty said with relief.
“Yeah. So, uh, since you won’t give me your name, can I have that ride home? I need to get some clothes.”
&n
bsp; “Okay. I’m parked this way.” As we walked away from the crowd, she said, “Do you think they all got super powers like we did?”
“That seems highly unlikely.”
“Yeah, but can you imagine?”
I grinned and shook my head. “I still can’t imagine we got them.”
“Me neither,” she giggled.
“I wonder if you can do the flame thing?”
“Who knows,” she shrugged.
We both caught the sound of emergency sirens in the distance.
I said, “Sounds like 911 is finally working. Do you think the entire planet went to sleep just now, or only San Diego?”
“If I was a betting woman, which I am,” she grinned, “I’d say no more than half the planet. Unless there were two UFOs, one on each side shooting a green laser at the same time.”
“Two wouldn’t do it,” I said thoughtfully. “At the very least, you’d need six to get full coverage. One on each opposing end of the X, Y, and Z axes.” I tapped all six locations around an imaginary globe. “Here, here, here… here, here… and here.”
She smirked, “Axes?”
“Yeah. Axes. It’s plural for axis. Sorry. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Axes, axis. Call it whatever you want.”
“Oh, I will,” she grinned.
“Please do.”
She smiled, “Are you a nerd, Doug?”
“No,” I frowned.
“You’re a nerd,” she giggled.
“Shut up,” I grumbled. Having a stripper call you a nerd was an annoying trigger. The only thing missing were the jocks pointing and laughing while somebody snapped you with a wet towel or tried to give you a wedgie.
She rolled her eyes, “Calm down, Doug. I’m secretly a nerd too.”
I snorted, “Is that why you won’t tell me your name? Because you’re secretly a nerd who—” I stopped short of saying, who is also a stripper?
“Who what?” She folded her arms across her chest.
“Nothing!”
“No, tell me,” she demanded with an edge to her voice. “I’m secretly a nerd who… what?”
I didn’t answer.
“Tell me, Doug,” she said with increasing irritation.
