Super Human

by Michael Carroll

  He was of average height and build for his age. He had ordinary brown hair, blue eyes, a straight nose, and mostly even teeth. He was aware that he wasn’t particularly good-looking, but he was fairly sure that he wasn’t ugly either.

  His brother Cody was two years older. He had jet-black hair—always perfectly groomed—and deeply tanned skin, and was considered to be quite a catch. Cody played on the school baseball team, where he was something of a minor celebrity as a good all-rounder. He was involved in a dozen different social groups, excelled in most of his classes, and could play the guitar well enough that he was constantly turning down offers from his many friends to form a band.

  Everyone liked Cody, even the ultra-cynical kids who dressed only in black, hated everything, and thought that happy people were losers.

  And Lance liked his brother well enough too. The only thing that bothered him about Cody was his popularity. Lance didn’t want to be known as “Cody McKendrick’s little brother.” It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be compared to Cody—he didn’t want anyone to notice him at all.

  Lance’s philosophy was simple: If he ran a scam on someone and they remembered him, he’d failed. Even if he somehow still got away with it, it was a failure. The only true success was when he deprived someone of the burden of their money and they walked away without realizing what had really happened.

  He wanted to be like the superhuman who called himself Façade, except that Façade was a villain. Lance knew that if he could change his appearance at will then he’d be practically unstoppable.

  He didn’t see himself as a villain. He never took money from anyone who couldn’t afford it. Even when he was running a three-card monte con, he made a point of not taking all of the mark’s money. He knew that if the mark still had enough money to get home, then he’d be less likely to think he’d been ripped off. And there’d be a greater chance that he’d try again next time, in the hope that he might win his money back. Sometimes, if the mark insisted on risking the last of his money, Lance would give a few dollars back to him after he lost. That way the mark would think that Lance was an OK guy—and then he’d definitely come back again.

  Anyway, if they were dumb enough to believe that it was possible to win at three-card monte, they deserved to lose their money.

  Lance believed that there was nothing wrong with persuading people they could beat a game with impossibly high odds. The government did it all the time with the state lotteries. The chance of winning the Powerball jackpot was less than one in a hundred million. Statistically it was much, much harder to win than it would be to open the phone book at random in the dark, stick a pin in a page, do it forty times in a row, and hit the same number every time.

  He made his way back through the food court, down the escalator, and toward the west entrance.

  There was a large crowd clustered around the doorway. Perfect, Lance thought. Easy enough to get away if everyone is looking at something else.

  It was only as he was squeezing through the crowd that he began to wonder just what it was that had drawn hundreds of people to the entrance.

  He stretched up onto his toes to peer over the sea of heads, and spotted something shiny and silver. For a second he thought it was a guy in a motorbike helmet, but then the man turned his head, scanning the crowd.

  Oh no . . .

  Lance ducked down again, sidestepped past a woman holding up her toddler, and did his best to look completely innocent as he passed through the doors and began to amble away.

  He’d taken less than a dozen steps when he realized his mistake: When a big-time superhero makes an appearance at the local mall, only the guilty would leave the scene.

  It was too late.

  A heavy hand landed on Lance’s shoulder, and a deep, almost mechanical, voice said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Lance dry-swallowed. The hand on his shoulder was encased in metal. It was holding him firmly. Not tight enough to hurt—though it certainly looked as though it could do that—but tight enough that he couldn’t easily duck out of the grip and make a run for it.

  “Well?”

  “Just, y’know, uh . . . home?”

  He turned around slowly and looked at his distorted reflection in the polished, opaque visor of the armored man.

  The crowd had formed a circle around them. Lance knew now that he was not going to get away.

  Paragon was a head taller than Lance and covered head to toe in polished metal armor that seemed to be bristling with weapons and pieces of equipment. Fixed to a socket on his left hip was what looked like an oversize handgun; a three-pronged hook protruded from its barrel. His famous jetpack was strapped to his back, and three pairs of handcuffs were clipped to his belt, along with half a dozen stuffed pouches. Even his steel-covered gloves had small storage areas around the cuffs.

  Lance couldn’t help but notice a close grouping of dents and scratches in the silver chest-plate, and was glad that he wasn’t the guy who had shot at Paragon only to discover that the armor was bulletproof.

  “Your heartbeat and perspiration are way up. You’re the one the security guards were chasing. The junior cardsharp.” It wasn’t even a question. The armored man’s head swiveled smoothly from side to side. “Interesting situation we have here, kid. . . . You’re hardly worth the trouble of arresting. So what should I do? What would you do, if you were me?”

  Lance tried to shrug himself out of his jacket. “Um . . . give me a stern warning and let me go?”

  “And the money you’ve taken? How much?”

  “Ten bucks.”

  Paragon leaned closer, his helmet almost pressing against Lance’s forehead. “How much?”

  Lance swallowed again. Man, I am so busted. . . . “Hundred and forty-five.”

  “One hundred and forty-five dollars.” Without turning away from Lance, Paragon pointed through the onlookers toward a girl standing by the mall’s entrance with a collection tin. “Which you are kindly going to donate to charity, right?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Lance said, nodding. “That was the plan all along.”

  “Perhaps you’d be even kinder and round it up to, say, two hundred?”

  “I don’t have that much on me,” Lance stammered.

  “Just give as much as you can. That’s what good citizens do. Name?”

  “Jason Myers.” Lance was comfortable with that. It was the name he always used when doing business. He’d used it so often that when anyone called out the name Jason he automatically turned to look.

  “ID?”

  Lance reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew the fake student ID card, held it up for Paragon to see.

  After a moment, the armored hero nodded. “All right.” He plucked the card out of Lance’s hand. “You won’t mind if I keep this, will you? I’m going to add it to my collection. . . . Gotta tell you, though, this is one of the best I’ve seen. It’s almost perfect.”

  Lance sighed. “OK. You caught me. But you can’t do anything. I’m fourteen. You can’t arrest me. You’re not a cop.”

  With a trace of amusement in his voice, Paragon said, “I could hand you over to the security guards here.”

  “We’re outside the mall,” Lance said. “They’re only allowed to make arrests inside.”

  “So you know the law. Good for you. How about I hold on to you long enough for your parents to come looking? How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds like kidnapping.” Inwardly, Lance relaxed. There was no way that was going to happen. “And my folks won’t miss me for hours, ’cos they’re sick at home with the flu. You really think that this is a good use of your time? Surely there’s some real crooks out there that you could be bothering instead.”

  “Leave. Don’t come back.”

  Lance allowed his shoulders to sag, tried to look defeated. “OK, OK. I’m going.” He sighed and turned away. He muttered “jerk” under his breath, deliberately loud enough for Paragon to hear—he didn’t want the superhero
to know how relieved he felt. The situation could have turned out a lot worse.

  Red-faced, he pushed through the cheering crowd. Everyone would remember him now: He’d never be able to work this mall again. But there were other malls, and there was also the tourist district downtown. Tourists were easier to scam anyway.

  From behind, Lance heard the whine of Paragon’s jetpack kick into action, and glanced back to see the armored hero slowly rise into the air.

  The crowd clapped and hollered. It wasn’t every day that a superhero showed up in a small town like Fairview.

  What’s he doing here anyway? Lance asked himself. Have the supervillains all got the flu too or something?

  Then the jetpack’s whining grew closer, and Lance was buffeted by the blast as Paragon passed close overhead.

  The armored hero touched down in front of him, and stood with his arms folded. “Forgotten something?”

  “Um...”

  “The money.” Paragon extended his gloved hand.

  Reluctantly, Lance reached into his pocket and handed over a roll of bills. “There. Happy now?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, kid,” Paragon said. He flipped through the bills. “This is your decoy roll, a bunch of ones wrapped up in a twenty. Where’s the rest of it?”

  Someone in the crowd went “Oooh!” and sparked a ripple of light laughter.

  “Go on,” Paragon said. “Be a good citizen and make a charitable donation.”

  Another member of the crowd shouted, “Get a receipt, kid! It might be tax-deductible!” which triggered an even bigger laugh.

  Yeah, that’s hilarious. Lance could feel his cheeks burning as he passed back through the crowd with Paragon following close behind. A few snide comments were thrown his way, but he knew this wasn’t the right time to respond.

  The girl with the collecting tin smiled at him as he approached. If she’d been a crotchety old woman, it would have been bad enough, but she was young and pretty and cheerful.

  Lance dug deep into his other pocket and took out his real roll of bills, handed it all over to the girl. “Happy now?” he said to Paragon. “Can I go, or do you have to humiliate me even more?”

  “You think this is humiliation? Consider yourself lucky you’re not being arrested. Go on, get lost. But you just remember this next time you get the urge to rip people off.”

  Lance turned away, but the girl reached out and took hold of his arm. “Wait, wait!”

  Oh, what now?

  She pinned a tiny paper flag to the lapel of Lance’s jacket.

  CHAPTER 2

  Almost three hundred miles to the north, fifteen-year-old Roz Dalton felt her stomach clench in protest as the customized Bell 222B helicopter dipped and swerved and swooped over the landscape.

  She did her best to pay attention to her older brother and not think about how embarrassing it would be to throw up all over the floor. She’d never had a fear of flying until about a year earlier, when her brother insisted that it was time she learned. Then she started to have nightmares about the copter’s engine suddenly cutting out while she was at the controls.

  Her aviophobia had eased a little in the past couple of months, but she still knew she’d never be comfortable with sitting inside a wingless metal box that weighed over two tons and flew at one hundred and fifty miles per hour.

  Roz was slim with lightly tanned skin and black hair that until recently had reached most of the way down her back. Now it was so short it was almost a crew cut. She liked it better this way: It was easier to manage and took only a few minutes to wash and dry.

  Her brother Max was five years older. He was of average height and had a slim waist with a disproportionately large upper body, the result of far too many gymnasium hours on the pull-up bars and not enough on the rest of the equipment. Max had the same dark hair and piercing brown eyes as Roz, a family trait they’d inherited from their late mother.

  They both wore matte-black two-piece uniforms made from a lightweight bulletproof material that Max was in the process of patenting.

  “We’ll be going in fast,” Max was saying to Roz. “We don’t know who these people are or what they can do. And after last month’s debacle I don’t want you taking any risks. Got that?”

  Roz nodded. The knot in her stomach tightened as she recalled the battle, and she unconsciously rubbed her left arm just above the elbow: A violent but low-powered supervillain called Gladius had slashed at her with his sword, coming within an inch of removing her forearm. The wound had left a deep scar that Roz just knew was going to be permanent.

  Accompanying Roz and Max in the copter were three members of Max’s support team: Oliver French, Antonio Lashley, and Stephen Oxford. Unlike the Daltons, Ollie, Lash, and Ox were ordinary humans, but they were former U.S. Army Rangers, highly trained in hand-to-hand combat, weapons use, strategies, and survival.

  Sitting next to Roz was the white-clad superhero Quantum. He was about Max’s age, but tall and lean. Most of his face was hidden under his mask, and Roz sometimes envied his anonymity: Superheroes like Quantum and Titan didn’t have to worry about everyone recognizing them when they were off duty.

  Max, however, had never hidden the fact that he was superhuman—and because everyone knew who he was, there had seemed little point in Roz hiding her own identity.

  Quantum nudged Roz with his elbow. “You all right, Rosalyn?” He was one of the very few people who called her by her full name, but despite that she still liked him.

  She shrugged. “I’m fine.”

  This was only Roz’s fourth official mission. Her superhuman abilities had begun to develop four years earlier, but Max had always kept her at home with their younger brother Josh. Much as Roz had hated being left behind, she had never complained.

  “Whatever happened to that boyfriend of yours?” Quantum asked. “Someone with his abilities could be pretty useful on a mission like this.”

  “I think you’re confusing me with someone else,” Roz said. She tried to keep her expression neutral. It hurt that she’d had only one relationship and it hadn’t lasted very long.

  “No, I’m certain it was you. You were seeing that guy who could—”

  Max loudly cleared his throat, interrupting them. “If you two are done? Thank you. The Midway power plant is due to go online next month,” Max said, unrolling a map of the target area. “That’s almost three months ahead of schedule, but I’m told that the safety checks were all in the green as of this morning. They’ve only got a minimum complement of security and staff.”

  “How many are we up against?” Quantum asked, peering at the map.

  “Unknown.” Max tapped the map with a gloved forefinger. “They crashed through the perimeter here in a stolen Securicor truck. Took out the guards and shot their way into the plant. We believe there are at least four of them still outside, using the truck as cover. We don’t know whether they’re trying to sabotage the plant or steal from it. Fact is, the reactor doesn’t have a core yet—there’s no plutonium for anyone to steal. We’ll be landing zero-point-five miles to the north. Quantum, you’ll scout ahead, let us know what we’re up against. Just keep to the perimeter—check out their defenses.”

  Quantum nodded, then said, “I can phase myself through the walls and—”

  “No,” Max interrupted. “We can’t take the risk. Remember Cádiz?”

  Roz noted the exchange of looks between the two men, and she knew what it meant: On a recent mission to the Spanish city, the supervillain Termite had rigged a warning device that could detect when Quantum was using his ability to phase through solid objects—it had almost cost three hostages their lives.

  “Until we can find a way to block that sort of detector, phasing yourself is off the table.” Max turned to his sister. “Roz, you hang back with the chopper until we have a better idea of what’s going on, understood?”

  The pilot called, “Ninety seconds to target. Hold tight, I’m taking her down.”

  The copter banked t
o the left and dropped sharply. Roz clutched the edges of her seat and tried not to lose her breakfast.

  The swooping and lurching didn’t seem to bother the men at all. The Rangers were running a last-minute check on their weapons and body armor, and Max was pulling on his uniform’s matching helmet.

  Ollie jumped up and slid open the door, and a blast of hot, dusty wind howled through the copter.

  “Suit up, Roz,” Max shouted.

  As Roz was picking up her helmet the copter lurched, dropped even more sharply. The helmet slipped from her grasp and rolled toward the door.

  She reached for it with her mind, stopped its roll, lifted it up, and plucked it out of the air.

  She looked up to see Quantum smiling at her. “Man, I wish I could do that!”

  Roz’s telekinesis was almost second nature to her now. Just by concentrating, she could move almost any object, as long as it was in her line of sight. The size of the object didn’t seem to present any problem, but its mass did. So far, she hadn’t been able to lift anything heavier than her own weight.

  Her helmet wavered in the air as the copter touched down with a bump. Max yelled, “Quantum—Go!”

  The speedster vanished.

  Half a mile there and back, Roz thought. How long is that going to—

  Roz jumped: Quantum was suddenly standing in front of her. He picked up the map, snatched a pencil from Ox’s hand, and began marking Xs and circles on the map. “Eight on the outside. Four here, two here, two over this side. At least three more on the way out through the doors, heading this way.” He drew an arrow on the map. “The gate and wall provide them with cover here and here, but the terrain shelters us from their view up to about here. . . .” He drew a larger circle, then wiped the sweat from his upper lip on the back of his glove. “The men are armed with HK11Es, looked like. Standard lightweight body armor, all gray. No insignia that I could see. Max, there’s not one of them under thirty and they look like they know what they’re doing.”

  “Good work,” Max said. “You . . . Quantum, you’re sweating.”