Fire and Thunder
A Superhero Novel
By Bowen Greenwood
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www.bowengreenwood.com
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2016 by Bowen Greenwood
Cover art by James of goonwrite.com
Edited by Sherrie Dolby-Arnoldy
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
www.bowengreenwood.com
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
The Tale of Hope and Drake
Chapter 15 – Hope and Drake Part 1
Chapter 16 – Hope and Drake Part 2
Chapter 17 – Hope and Drake Part 3
Chapter 18 – Hope and Drake Conclusion
Chapter 19
The Present
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Prologue
A city burned in a roiling ball of superheated gas and ash. Dark silhouettes of buildings cast long shadows created by the blazing light of the explosion. Tiny figures of fleeing humans looked like ants against the scale of the fireball. The neon lights of casinos on the strip — normally bright enough to compete with the noon sun in the desert — appeared only as lightless black spaces in front of an unstoppable wave of conflagration.
Las Vegas burned.
The flash snapped bright against the fabric of the eyes, bright enough to hurt. The sound, like thunder but oppressively louder, roared without ceasing. Crumbling husks of airplanes filled with tourists arriving or departing from the gamblers’ Mecca fell like children’s toys thrown against a wall.
Against this backdrop of flaming destruction, a voice boomed out even louder than the explosion, as if the power of it could squash the fire and the buildings all at once. Everywhere at once, the words echoed and reverberated.
“Millions die in fire unless you find Terri Jackson.”
Chapter 1
Not many people walk toward a man with a gun. Most run in the other direction, of course. It’s the rational thing to do. Heroes run toward the man with the gun. Very few people walk, and of those that do, even fewer smile and wave while walking.
Connor Merritt’s wild dark brown hair rebelled against combs and brushes. He wore a black leather jacket. Ominously, the jacket possessed a sizable collection of what could only be bullet holes. The cuffs of his blue jeans encircled black boots. He walked with a smooth gait, his body fully at ease.
The man with the gun, however, was anything but fully at ease. He shouted, “Freeze! Back off man! I’ll kill you!” Then he shifted the gun toward Connor. He grew more and more agitated with every step Connor took, waving his weapon and pushing it forward toward Connor as a substitute for pulling the trigger.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll do it man!”
Three of them stood along the edge of a parking garage – Connor, the man with the gun, and the woman he planned to rob. Outside, hints of the dawn to come oozed into the sky in the east, but the sun’s entrance still hung in the future. Instead, buzzing fluorescent streetlights provided the only illumination. Cigarette butts and discarded gum littered the ground. At this hour, a small number of cars dotted the area like checkers toward the end of the game.
The armed man and his female victim stood in the aisle between yellow-lined parking spaces. The woman stood perfectly immobile, either frozen with fear or perhaps tense on the edge of action. Her blue slacks and suit jacket came across as awfully formal for the early hour — as if perhaps she were on her way to a business breakfast.
The nervous mugger seemed to vibrate like a violin string. Tall, skinny, like a potential basketball player before training bulked him up, the gunman looked about Connor’s age. His dark hair pressed tight against his scalp. Again, he waved his weapon and threatened Connor.
“Stop walking right now or I will kill you.”
“I know there’s more to you than that,” Connor replied. “You don’t want to be a murderer.”
“Shut up man! Just shut up and walk away!”
“Put the gun down. I’m not here to hurt you. I just need to talk to that woman. I can’t let you kill her. She’s unbelievably important, friend. Please calm down.”
The gunman did the opposite. He pulled the trigger.
A painfully loud explosion hammered all of their ears. Inside the gun, smokeless powder caught fire instantaneously. The gasses of that combustion propelled a lead and copper projectile out of the barrel faster than sound. The slide — the metal top portion that ran the length of the gun’s barrel — catapulted back faster than the eye could see and a gleaming brass cartridge flew skyward, trailing smoke.
The lead slug punched Connor low on the left side of his torso. What began as a rounded triangular shape squashed and mushroomed when it tore through his leather jacket and hit his skin. The result was a misshapen hunk of metal. A planned element of the design, the broader, flatter shape after impact made the bullet a more efficient killing device.
What was left of the bullet fell to the pavement in front of Connor. Not even one drop of blood fell with it.
Not before the second one hit. Or the third. Or the fourth, fifth, sixth… The gunman gave up only after completely emptying his ten-round magazine.
It hurt – they always hurt. Objects moving at hundreds of feet per second were pretty much destined to hurt. Keeping his smile in place took maximal effort.
The gunman stared with his mouth hanging open. He looked down at his weapon – the slide was locked back over an empty chamber – and then back at Connor. He only closed his mouth long enough to form a profanity.
Calmly walking into danger came a lot easier to a man whose skin was bulletproof.
“You’re not a murderer, friend,” Connor said. “Whatever else happened today, that’s not on your conscience. You haven’t killed a man.”
If his words gave the man any peace at all, Connor wasn’t destined to know it then. The gunman turned to the open parking lot just outside the garage and fled as fast as his legs would carry him.
***
Connor remembered the terror most of all.
A month ago, he’d been an innocent bystander in a convenience store robbery. One moment, the clerk behind the counter smiled at him, toyed with the ends of her blonde hair, and he searched around the corners of his mind for enough courage to ask her out, like scrabbling for loose change under the cushions of a couch. The next moment, gang members, or just punks, burst into the store waving guns and shouting at the top of their lungs demanding money. The girl panicked, the robbers pulled the trigger, and Connor threw himself between the danger and the girl, expecting to die.
No one was more surprised than him when he didn’t.
The girl dialed 911. Connor distinctly remembered her saying, “I think he’s dead.” He remembered the criminals fleeing the scene of what they thought was a murder before the police could show up. He would never forget how it felt when the bullets tore through his brand new leather jacket and impacted his skin.
More than that, though, he would never forget how it felt to discover none of it had done him any damage.
Like many people confronted with the
completely unexplainable, his first reaction was fear. Connor fled the scene, taking his roommate Lincoln Blunt with him. He denied all of Linc’s attempts to ask him what happened. He tried to deny that anything happened. He planned to simply ride his motorcycle to work and hope the whole thing faded out of memory.
The government had other plans.
The girl, of course, told the police everything that had happened. Obviously, the police told someone else because the next morning federal agents showed up at the apartment he and Linc rented. They arrested Connor and took him to a secret facility dedicated to investigating incidents like his. It turned out he wasn’t the only one. A blunt federal investigator asking him questions let slip that there were more like him, that the government tested them and experimented on them, and that they didn’t yet know what caused the “abnormal abilities,” as they called it.
That’s when he met an older man named Ethan Moses and a girl his own age named Anna Wales. After popping into his locked cell like they were light and someone had thrown a switch, the two offered the explanation the government couldn’t. While there was no scientific basis for skin that stopped bullets, or teleporting from place to place, or seeing the future, there was another basis.
The Bible contained dozens of stories like that.
Mr. Moses and Anna made a case Connor refused to believe at first: the things that occurred in the Book of Acts and the Gospels weren’t just stories from another age. They were real and, more important, they were happening again.
In the Bible, zealots stoned the Apostle Paul to death, but he stood up and walked away without as much as a scratch. Today, Connor could take ten rounds of nine-millimeter hollow point and keep smiling.
In the Bible, a believer baptized someone, and then found himself suddenly in a completely different city. Today, Connor’s new friend Anna could teleport.
Neither of them knew why or how, but they told Connor they were living proof. God was once again giving people miraculous gifts. Connor didn’t understand why. He didn’t understand how. He didn’t even really understand much about God.
But that morning, having just interrupted the mugging in the chilly predawn parking lot, he looked at the scattering of misshapen lead and copper slugs in front of his feet and understood one thing for sure.
Supernatural gifts were real.
He had stood in the parking lot, saving a woman from armed robbery, for exactly that reason. One miraculous gift was prophecy, and one of those prophecies described this woman as the only hope to save millions of lives.
“Millions die in fire unless you find Terri Jackson.”
Chapter 2
The woman who had almost been robbed stood staring. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes stretched open as if she could understand better the wider they were.
“What just happened?”
He smiled at her. He made a conscious effort to keep the fear of the prophecy away from his expression.
“You must be Terri Jackson,” he said aloud.
“Yes, I… How do you know my name? What’s going on here?”
So this woman in the fancy business clothes with the black hair up in a neat bun was the one. She could save Las Vegas from fiery destruction. Oddly enough, she looked the part. Slender, with a serious face and dark eyes, she looked athletic and strong. An air of confidence radiated out from her. She looked like an FBI agent in a serial killer movie, bursting in at the last minute to save the child.
In that moment, the panic his friend Mr. Moses felt about the prophecy seemed misplaced. If Terri Jackson held the only hope of saving millions from death by fire, then those millions had good reason to hope.
He was about to ask her to come with him, but he barely had time to say, “Hi, I’m Connor.” Two more people walked out from behind a support pillar in the parking garage, interrupting him.
One of them, he had never seen before. Tall and muscular, he took slow, heavy steps forward. Longer light brown hair framed a face a bit older than Connor’s. He had piercing green eyes. His lips were drawn back, exposing teeth which shaped an angry expression. He wore black boots, black fatigue pants, and a black tank top.
Unlike the man himself, Connor had seen that outfit many times before.
When Connor and his friends took their first step on the road to discovering their gifts, they quickly found they weren’t alone. Other people had powers too, and not all of them believed those powers came from God. Some believed they came from strength of will, and confidence, and desire.
Some believed their gifts gave them power — power over others.
That group took a name for themselves: The Legion. Dedicated to the idea that people with unusual abilities or powers should use them to reshape the world, they trained together, lived together, and adopted a uniform. Once, The Legion offered Connor and his friends the chance to join them. When he had said no, they became enemies.
Connor had never had enemies before. Having enemies with powers made it far worse.
The boy Connor hadn’t seen before wore The Legion’s uniform. Seeing him in it told Connor all he needed to know.
Like the outfit, so the second person. Familiar to Connor.
Sebastian Crest wore his blond hair trimmed into a high and tight flat top. He, too, dressed all in black – fatigues and a tank top. His scrawny build looked almost unhealthy, and he wore a few days’ growth of beard on his chin. The sneer on his lips seemed permanently tattooed there.
Sebastian had founded Legion. He gave them their ethic: use your power to rule. He gave them their martial arts training, their uniforms, and their orders. Once, he had delighted in Connor as a prize recruit, but that hadn’t lasted long.
Connor started to say, “Sebast–”
A sound like sizzling bacon but louder cut him off. Connor looked toward it. The new guy – the brown-haired boy he’d noticed moments ago – was holding his hand out, pointed straight at Connor, with the palm flat and facing forward – like a policeman ordering traffic to stop.
And something like a flaming ball of fire flew out from his hand, directly at Connor.
Connor shouted in alarm. Just as he was about to dive out of the path of the fiery menace, he saw the young female mugging victim standing right in the path of the fireball.
He tackled her as he dove, getting both of them out of danger.
“Hey—”
The sound of the fireball drowned out whatever the woman might have said about being tackled. It echoed and reverberated through the garage as it flew over their heads and dissipated a couple hundred feet beyond in the abandoned parking lot.
Connor stared in wonder at the last place he’d seen it. It was gone as if it never existed, leaving nothing behind but a stink like burning plastic.
And, of course, a sense of impending dread in Connor.
“Millions die in fire unless you find Terri Jackson.”
And here, as he tried to make contact with Terri Jackson, stood a new person with a gift: a gift of fire. Connor stared at the new person. His appearance could not mean anything good.
Once again, the one Connor hadn’t seen before flung his hand out with the palm facing forward.
Once again, the sizzling sound returned.
Once again, a ball of fire flew in Connor’s direction.
The woman he had knocked down earlier followed his gaze and saw it. Then she cried out and tried to cover her head. Connor rolled to the side, then grabbed her arm and pulled her with him. The fireball impacted mere feet from them, with a blast wave that rattled Connor’s teeth.
This time, he was more prepared and closer to being on his feet. He straightened up from dragging the erstwhile mugging victim out of the way and charged at the sullen young man with Sebastian. He started to move his hands again, but Connor tackled him in mid-wave. They both tumbled to the ground.
Connor leapt back to his feet and was about to kick him to make sure he stayed down when he felt a fist in his right kidney.
Grunting, he st
raightened up and whirled around. Sebastian stood in front of him, fists up in front of his face, grinning.
“Long time no see, Connor,” he said. “Linc says hello.”
Connor longed to lash out at that twisted, arrogant grin. And the mention of his old friend Linc made it worse. Connor and Sebastian had a history, and it included friends choosing sides. Warily, he brought his anger under control, put his hands up in a guard stance, and shuffled back slightly to open up some distance between them.
“I’m glad to see you again, Sebastian. We have a lot to talk about.”
The blond man laughed. “Talk about? You and me? The only thing we have to talk about is why you’re a traitor!”
And with that, he charged forward, throwing a series of punches at Connor’s face.
Connor slipped to the left, dodging and hitting back with an uppercut to the ribs. He’d been preparing for this fight ever since his last confrontation with Sebastian.
Prepared, yes. Figured out how to win? Not so much.
There was no warning. Connor swung an uppercut at his foe’s side, and then all of a sudden Sebastian wasn’t there. Gone like the fireball, leaving no evidence at all. Gritting his teeth, Connor whipped his head left and right, looking for the other man.
The fundamental problem Sebastian presented in a fight was he could turn invisible. His power presented an extraordinary challenge in a fight. Connor had been thinking about how to beat him for months, and he’d gotten nowhere.
A fist hit him in the kidney again, and once again Connor grunted. It wasn’t that painful. His skin was impenetrable, and a fist didn’t move even one percent as fast as a bullet. But long experience sparring in his uncle’s dojo taught Connor to always hate it when someone slipped a fist past his guard. And a punch still transferred momentum, pushing Connor off balance.
He spun to face Sebastian and caught a fleeting glimpse of him before the man disappeared again.
Frustrated, Connor threw a hard front kick anyway. How can you fight someone you can’t see?
That’s when he heard the other one coming at him. Connor whirled to see the long-haired young man who apparently could call down fire. Now, he flung his hand forward, almost like an exaggerated motion of someone trying to shake water off wet hands. A smaller ball of fire flew at Connor. He leapt to the side barely in time to dodge it, then threw himself into a flying front kick aimed at Mr. Fireball’s head.
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