The Wanderer (Book 2): Stranded

by Giancioppo, Danny

  Jason fought for years over who he was– he still is, I knew that! Everyone else might look at him like he’s Mr. Perfect, but Jason’s a wreck nine times out of ten.

  Maybe it’s because of his parents. They ditched him when he was two, decided to be deadbeats, or druggies, or whatever happened to them. We never really knew for sure; I think Jason always wanted to believe that they died, morbid as it may sound. That their being taken from him was an accident always sounded more appealing than the alternative, I guess.

  Still, maybe that was why he hated justice. Hated putting away criminals. What if they were his parents? People like his parents, I mean. What if it ruins the lives of other people, other kids? But how could he not see that keeping scum out there is only hurting more of the good people? Him, me, our friends!

  No, probably not that. I don’t know why he would think like that; that’s not Jason. Jason was kind, loving, emotional. He could be a prick, sure, but I loved him. He fought for what was right– talk about nine times out of ten, nine point nine times out of ten, he ended up doing the most righteous thing he could– and he never gave in easily.

  I remember even the smallest of things as kids, he wouldn’t tolerate. If me, Alex, and Will were hanging out with him in elementary school, and someone started picking on another kid for just a little too long, or went a little too far, he lost it. Shouting matches and red faces, pointing and shoving; the whole nine yards. It could be annoying, sure, but I respected it. I still do.

  Which is why this was so confusing. Why would he be so against helping people? I’ve ran through it a thousand times in my head, and no reason seems strong enough to not go for it. Sure, we might screw up some times– he already gets people killed with the challengers– we’ll adapt; we’ll live and learn. That’s what heroes do after all, isn’t it?

  Maybe it was because of my powers. I mean, after all, I think I had the potential if nothing else to be much stronger than Jason. I could control time, for crying out loud! Not forever, sure, but I could stand in a pocket for up to seven minutes now; I was growing. Not to mention, whatever it was that was going on with my hands back at the apartment complex…

  With that in mind, I held my hand out, and focused. I remembered the feeling: like a vacuum, pulling the very fabric of the ground closer to me. There was this innate idea in my head– call it an instinct, maybe– that I could… manipulate it, somehow.

  I stared at a loose rock on the moon, right beyond my hand, and extended out my fingers. At first nothing happened, but as I recalled, Jason always said focus was key. I tried to clear my mind, focus only on the rock and my hand, and make something happen. I could feel potential, as though there was some sort of string between me and the rock, but I couldn’t get it to tighten.

  Plus, I could hardly get my mind to stop chattering. I’d hardly been able to sleep the last few weeks I’d been “back,” let alone stop thinking. It was like there were a thousand voices in my head, trying to figure everything out at once. I think my intelligence had increased with the Wanderer title, but clearly not as much as Jason’s; I didn’t know about any new species or planets or cosmic inequities which required my attention. I just had a storm of thoughts swirling through my ever aching mind at all times: do this, don’t do that. Why do this, but not that? Can Jason do this? Why can’t I do that, if Jason can do this? What will the others think if I try to do this, if Jason won’t do that? Should there be a difference between this and that? Should there be a difference between Jason and I? Maybe only one of us needed to be the superhero? Maybe it was him. No, it had to be me, right? Could it be both of us? Could I do it without him?

  Suffice to say, clarity was seemingly unattainable for me. However, I also remembered Jason saying emotion drove our powers just as well; sort of a focus on the subjective, rather than objective. I may not have been as much as an emotional butterfly as Jason, but I’d been going through a lot myself recently, so this wouldn’t be too hard.

  I got mad. Really mad. Mad at Jason, at the whole U.S.B., at our friends. At the whole world. How could this happen to me? Why? How was that fair? Not only that, but with this unbelievable second chance, why was it being wasted because of other’s stubborn nature? I try to save people, I’m the bad guy. Jason flips off the whole news-watching world, he gets a date with his favorite singer, and the girl that for some inexplicable reason chose him over me. No, I’m not better than Jason, but… I mean, come on! How is that fair? How is that right? He goes through a rough childhood, so now he gets to be the new savior of the human race? The savoir who wants nothing to do with his oh-so-devout disciples? And I don’t get so much as a thank you for trying, Ranger?

  No. No, I get “aren’t you the Wanderer’s sidekick?” Rover, Ranged, Wanderer, why do you care about us, when your best friend apparently has decided for the both of you that you actually don’t?

  I get Bell and Bentley chewing me out at training for going too hard, and yet when Jason and I spar and he goes cosmic on me, I still get told to leave. I’m told I went too far for using a power I didn’t even understand. For playing along with Jason’s instructions. But oh, as soon as the little boy-wonder gets bruised, I’ve suddenly crossed a line.

  I get all my friends, my friends, turning their backs on me for Jason! Choosing his side!?

  The guy who would rather see the world’s population live in fear than love of us.

  The guy who doesn’t see any kind of positive to being in the limelight, because– oh, think of the “cost?” The cost?

  What about the cost of being socially outcasted by everyone in your life? Not even being able to talk to your god damn parents about the fact that your aren’t dead because what if they say something; because I guess Jason knows them better than me, and they “talk too much.”

  I screamed into my suit, letting all the primal emotion out, and my vision flickered in and out of this golden hue. As it did, not only did the rock disintegrate, a massive chunk of the moon turned to dust, and I left at least a ten foot hole in its wake.

  I fell onto my ass as my vision went back to normal, and I had to catch my breath. I felt so severely wiped, but at the same time I couldn’t help but laugh a little. I literally just converted rocks into dust. I rematerialized them.

  I took a deep breath, and tried to stand back up. I felt sore all over, so I floated up above the ground, and reached out my other hand toward the moon’s surface. I closed my hand into a fist, and another patch of ground collapsed, only this time, with a little thinking behind my movements, the dust all swirled into the air.

  I tried to manipulate it– it felt like trying to balance a plate on a stick– and it swirled around, constantly grouping all together and then spreading out again.

  I had to keep using my emotions. The sense of power I had when I did felt… intoxicatingly good. I understood how Jason must have felt whenever he went fully cosmic. It was exhilarating.

  Finally, I used my other hand, and crushed all the dust together. I focused on the space surrounding the dust, and made a small pocket, which the dust all sucked into. Once I opened my hands again, the dust was just… gone.

  I plopped myself back on the ground, and retracted my helmet piece. I felt this rush of emotion tiding over me, and I just needed to let it all loose. In the vacuum of space, I wouldn’t be heard, and I knew from some lesson of Jason’s way back when that I could survive without the helmet.

  Something about our body working to keep the oxygen/carbon dioxide flow so constant and minute that it hardly left our lips. It just swirled through from our lungs to our mouths.

  I just shrieked for a solid few seconds, and it was so odd. No sound came out, but I felt my muscles flexing, my body chilling. Jason always said he heated up when he went cosmic, but not me. I just felt this… chill, run through the entirety of my body. In some sense, it was uncomfortable, but in another, it was refreshing.

  My eyes kept trying to grab hold of the golden vision– again, probably a parallel to Jason’s white
vision, likely a means to visualize our sudden increase in power usage– and I stumbled around, trying to stand. I saw the swirling clouds way down on our pale blue dot, and as I swayed on my feet, I held my hand out toward them.

  They hardly moved as it was all the way up here, but I wanted to see stillness.

  More anger required. Jason kept getting on my case, kept trying to insist I was wrong about all this. Well maybe this was the point one time out of ten that he was wrong. Maybe I just needed to prove it to him. Maybe, for once, I should be the one taking the charge, being the leader, the harbinger of our future together. Maybe, for once, I should be the one to make the calls, and get what I want.

  Just maybe, I’d suffered enough, and deserved a win. I just needed to get Jason to listen to me. Get him to understand. I could talk to him, try to reason with him, but I know him better than anyone– even Alannah, I don’t care what she says. He won’t listen to reason. I’ll try, but he’s too stubborn. I need to show him somehow… a trial by fire, maybe. Because goddammit, maybe I needed to be a little drastic to bring about some good change for once.

  Maybe I should be the one making my own decisions, like an adult, and not some child in over his head.

  The “Ranger” was a stupid name anyway– it was Jason’s idea, for God’s sake! No, I deserved to name myself, and I would stick with exactly who I wanted to be in the first place, because Jason doesn’t get to direct my life.

  This didn’t have to be the tale of the great zero Jason for once, but Samuel Finn, the one person willing to go against the word of his people, put his public image on the line, and do what the right thing.

  My eyes stuck the golden light on, and I felt it swaying against my sockets. Like that, everything just sort of froze. The clouds stuck in place, the dust around my footsteps stuck mid-air, and I heard that same sweet sound of total, utter silence surrounding me.

  No cold, no warmth, nothing; just a single frame in existence, that was entirely mine to control. No past, no present, no future. Just this little pocket somewhere in between it all. No memories to be made, nor remembered, and no actions to be taken unless I decided them. My own, personal playpen.

  And as I held onto this frame in time, knowing full well I’d be staying here for a while, training my body as well as my mind, I realized exactly what I had to do. I had to make a plan, a trial by fire, to prove to Jason just what kind of heroes we deserved to be. Just the kind of people we’d show the world existed behind the masks.

  Jason Rhodes: the Wanderer, and Sam Finn: the Stranded.

  13

  Friends, Fur, Fears, and French Fries

  Remember the whole “have a little faith in your best friend" thing? Forget that, what I just said.

  It had been three days, and still no sign of Sam anywhere. The news outlets were losing it, our friend group was losing it, and of course, Bell and Bentley were losing all of it.

  I had been covering for him the past 72 hours, but I’ve got to be honest, I was running out of solid logic to defend him with. He was consistently making it harder and harder to trust he’d figure things out when it had been so god damn long without a word from him on how he was doing, or when he was planning on coming back.

  The public was demanding a number of things. Some people were saying that he should be put behind bars, which was ridiculous. Some argued he should be put to death, which once again, would probably fall on me; that or a nuclear bomb. Others just insisted he reveal who he was to the world as a sort of due that he owed to the public, to settle whether or not he was indeed the undead man brought back to life– the zombie. He was, but they didn’t need to know that.

  “Anything?” Alex asked, sitting across from me at the table. We were at a fast food place, just hanging out, because you know, I do love my other friends too. Granted, I was calling Sam, but that’s not the point.

  “Nothing,” I said, putting my phone back into my pocket. Alex shook his head, and continued to spin the quarter he had gotten back as change. “You know you should really just put that in the little donation box; nobody uses coins anyway,” I scolded. Alex just scoffed.

  “If nobody uses them, why would they need coins? They’d probably prefer cash,” he said.

  “I…I don’t know,” I confessed. It wasn’t a great argument, but I didn’t have it in me to fight back.

  “So what the hell are we gonna do about Sam, then?” he brought back up. I raised my eyebrows as I sipped my soda.

  “No idea,” I said. “I’ve gotta keep trying to reach him, I guess.”

  “Yeah, but you could also just like, go where he is,” Alex countered.

  “I want to give him his space,” I said. “I don’t want to just dive in on him. He’s going through a lot; I did once too.”

  “Yeah but didn’t you also have like, a buttload of information locked up in your head? He doesn’t even have that, right?”

  “I don’t think so, no. The brief moment when I touched his hand– when I saw inside his head– I didn’t sense any of the otherworldly knowledge I had.”

  “So his excuse is kinda terrible, is what I’m hearing,” Alex said. I laughed.

  “If that’s what you want to hear, then I guess I can’t change your mind,” I said. We were quiet for a minute then, and I got to enjoy the quiet normalcy of everyday life.

  It was rare that I ever seemed to, really. Regardless of the fact that for a long time my chest looked disproportionately large compared to the rest of my body, to the point where it looked like a massive tumor until I exercised enough– as well as painfully forced the suit to sink in a bit more– to even things out, I always just felt out of place. It was like I was constantly surrounded by extremely hazardous people, capable of shattering the glass of my normal life with the click of a phone. And yet these were the very same people I had to keep from harm’s way, from the very threats my powers brought.

  Plus, I just constantly had things to do. Training with drones and scientists and whatnot, alien attacks every couple weeks, and people constantly talking about the Wanderer all around me, like he was someone totally different.

  It was really unnerving, but I guess it was just the life I lived. So when I got to have these little moments with my friends, I relished it. The sound of people chattering, the soft radio hum of some newish song I couldn’t even name, and the heart-stopping smell of artery-clogging fast food. It was a real picture perfect day.

  “So, have you and Alannah talked anymore about moving in together?” Alex said. I shook my head.

  “I mean, we’ve brought it up once or twice, but with everything going on right now, I think we’re just putting that on pause. God knows telling Sam either Ana was moving in or I was moving out would probably only freak him out even more than he already was,” I explained. Alex nodded his head.

  “You could always just have him live there with you guys though, couldn’t you?” he said.

  “I…I don’t know,” I said. “I just… It’s not that I don’t trust him, but he’s just been so on edge lately, not to mention that guy who found our address the other day… I’d rather just keep Alannah away from that, for now at least.”

  “You think Sam might be dangerous?” Alex asked. He seemed shocked, more so than I’d expected, honestly.

  “I don’t– I’m not sure… Look, can we just let that go for now? He didn’t pick up, so for right now there’s nothing we can do about him,” I asked. “Let’s just eat our lunch as two friends who pretend to live totally normal lives.”

  “I don’t have to pretend anything. I do live a normal life,” Alex pointed out, grinning.

  “Right,” I chuckled, settling into my seat.

  I bet you’ll never guess what happened next.

  There was a massive crash behind me, somewhere outside. I closed my eyes exhaustedly, and didn’t even bother to turn around.

  “Is that for me?” I asked Alex. He sighed.

  “Yeah…”

  “Great…”

 
“You wanna go around back, I’ll watch our six?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great.”

  We got up from our seats, and feigned a nervous hustle outside, much like everyone else in the building. We made our way around back, and ran over to the dumpsters, where thankfully nobody else was hiding.

  “We good?” I asked, Alex checking all around. I was too, but always good to have an extra set of eyes.

  “I think so. Be quick though,” he cautioned.

  I made the suit come on around me; it only took a second. Alex still kind of gawked at me like he couldn’t believe it.

  “It’s been four years,” I said.

  “It’s still a cool party trick,” he said.

  “Party trick?”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Not a party trick.”

  “A gimmick?”

  “How about an awesome talent?”

  “Wanderer!” something shouted on the other side of the fast food place. It sounded… husky? I guess?

  “You should go,” Alex said.

  “Right,” I agreed. “Don’t get caught in the crossfire.”

  “Right. See you later man,” Alex waved.

  “See you, buddy.” I took off, going high into the sky. I find it’s often better to appear as though I could be coming from anywhere rather than right next to the challengers. It makes finding out my super secret identity that much harder.

  Anyway, after a brief stint in the clouds, I landed nearby, and took a look at the ugly mug. Remember when I said he sounded husky? Never in my life have I been so spot on with a random speculation.

  This thing, known as– and I’m not making this up– a Fur Beast, was this big, white, hulking gorilla-thing. It’s real name was a Ferbasilous, but who cares about official titles nowadays? It was like ten feet tall, and had a much stiffer posture than a gorilla. Rather than a hunch, it stood with a firm, straight back. It was littered in something similar to fur, though it was a little more coarse. Massive hands, and four feet that were similar in shape to said massive hands. Six digits on each.