Super Human

by Michael Carroll

  Then one of the men opened fire.

  Roz threw herself back to the ground as a ragged line of bullet-holes appeared in the plywood sheet.

  There was a shout of, “You idiot! No!” followed by a long, sharp scream.

  The gunfire abruptly stopped.

  Someone had been hit.

  Roz stared. The perforated sheet of plywood wavered in the air.

  For a moment, there was nothing but silence.

  Then the guns erupted once more, a torrent of bullets that tore the plywood sheet into sawdust.

  CHAPTER 5

  Twelve miles away from the Midway nuclear power plant, Ab-Twelve miles away from the Midway nuclear power plant, Abigail de Luyando glared at the six kids in the corner booth and wished they would either order something else or get out. She’d been working since eight-thirty that morning and it was now coming up on seven in the evening. Almost eleven hours on her feet and so far today she’d made only eight dollars and twenty-five cents in tips.

  Every seat and booth in the 1950s-style diner was occupied, and outside the door the long line of potential customers was growing, even though those at the end of the line probably wouldn’t get a table for over an hour. The kids in the corner booth were taking up space that could otherwise have been occupied by people a little more generous with their money. She had given them the check twenty minutes ago and so far all they’d done with it was make a paper plane.

  But Abby knew that she couldn’t push them too hard. Some of them knew who she was and if she got on their bad side they might tell her manager that she was only fourteen. Worse, they might tell her mother that she hadn’t been to school in weeks and was now working full-time at Leftover’s Finer Diner.

  She walked over to the booth, pulling her notepad and pencil out of her apron pocket. “Can I get you guys anything else before you go?”

  The nearest boy leered at her, a big cheesy grin on his face. He grabbed hold of her bare arm, holding on tight enough to leave a white mark on her dark skin. “How about your phone number?” Abby thought that he would have been good-looking if not for his impressive collection of acne scars and his tarnished silver nose ring.

  Abby pulled her arm free. “No can do. I don’t have a phone. But I’m saving up my tips for one.”

  Four of the boy’s friends went “Oooh!” and laughed, but the one closest to the wall—a white girl Abby vaguely remembered from middle school—made a face and said, “Here’s a tip: Be nicer to the customers and they might keep coming back.”

  Abby faked a laugh while she mentally pictured herself beating up the girl with a chair. “You got me there. Look, guys, if you’re not going to order anything else I’ll have to ask you to leave.” She tilted her head toward the door. “There’s a whole line of people waiting.”

  “Sure, yeah,” the nose-ring boy said as he turned back to his friends. “Coupla minutes, OK?”

  Abby nodded and returned to the counter. The manager—a pale twenty-year-old with limp hair and a shirt that was three sizes too big—tapped a cheerful, rapid beat on the counter with his hands and said, “Come on, kiddo, pull it together. Only three more hours to go!”

  “Easy for you to say, Dave. You’ve only been here since five.”

  Dave’s grin slipped a little. “Table four are waiting for their check and the guy on seven dropped his cheeseburger. New one’s coming up now.” The cook passed three plates through the little window from the kitchen, and Dave slid them toward Abby. “Table two. Bacon fries, club with no lettuce, tortilla platter. And they want a strawberry malt and a Diet-Pepsi float.”

  Abby spent the next fifteen minutes bustling back and forth between the tables, the register, the counter, and the kitchen window. The only other waitress on duty that evening was Mandy, a forty-three-year-old mother of four who had spent almost the whole shift sitting in the kitchen and complaining to the cook about how busy the diner was.

  There should have been four people covering the floor, but Keith and Jasmine had called in sick at the last minute, so Abby was practically working the whole place on her own.

  Mentally she was exhausted, but physically she still felt as fresh as she had that morning. It took something a great deal more strenuous than a double-shift in the diner to wear Abby out. There’s got to be a better way to earn some money, she said to herself. I hardly need superhuman strength to carry plates around.

  Almost exactly eight months earlier, Abigail de Luyando discovered that she was not an ordinary person. It had been a Friday night—early Saturday morning, really—and she’d been locking up the diner when two men pushed open the door and demanded that she hand over the contents of the register.

  Without thinking, she’d picked up a steel tray and thrown it at the nearest man. It slammed into his forehead and knocked him backward over a table. The second man lunged at her: Abby grabbed his arm, picked up a fork, and stabbed it down through the sleeve of his leather biker’s jacket and into the counter. As he struggled to get free she punched him in the face, knocking him out cold.

  When the cops arrived to arrest the would-be robbers they had to leave the jacket behind: No matter how hard they pulled, they weren’t able to remove the fork from the countertop.

  The following morning, Abby arrived at the diner to find Dave the manager’s normally pale face red with effort as he struggled to wrench the fork free. “How did you do that?” he’d asked her.

  “Just lucky, I guess.” When she was sure he wasn’t watching, Abby grabbed hold of the fork. It came free of the counter as easily as if it had been stuck into a stack of pancakes, and the jacket slid to the floor.

  After the morning rush was over, Abby had gone out to the large, cluttered yard at the back of Leftover’s Finer Diner. Piled up in one corner was a collection of weather-tarnished aluminum tubes and panels, discarded after the diner’s refit the previous year.

  Abby picked up one of the longer tubes and twisted it into a knot like it was Play-Doh. Shaking her head with disbelief, she threw the tube to one side and—just to see what would happen—she aimed a punch at one of the aluminum panels.

  It was like pushing her fist through rice paper.

  Over the following weeks, Abby had experimented and practiced every free moment. She was stronger and faster than a normal fourteen-year-old girl should be, but she quickly discovered a strange quirk of her abilities: She could just barely pick up four cinder blocks in one go, but had little trouble tipping over a much heavier Dumpster. She was able to flick pennies across the counter with such force that they buried themselves so deep in the wall that she couldn’t dig them out, but couldn’t throw a ceramic cup much farther than an ordinary person.

  Her powers really worked only on metal objects.

  By seven-thirty the line outside the diner had thinned a little: Mandy hadn’t taken a break in half an hour. The pressure eased enough for Abby to tackle the corner booth once more.

  “Sorry to interrupt your fun, guys, but we’re running a business here. Time you moved on.”

  The boy with the nose ring smirked. “And what if we don’t?”

  “See the sign by the door? The management reserves the right to refuse admission. You do want to be allowed in next time, don’t you?”

  “All right, all right. We get the message.”

  Five of them slid out of the booth, but the last—the girl Abby remembered from school—lingered. She began poking through the pile of dollar bills and loose change on the table. “Let’s see. . . . Check comes to thirteen seventy-five. . . .” The girl counted out fourteen dollars and scooped up the rest. In an overly cheerful voice she said, “Keep the change!”

  “Wow, a whole quarter? Thanks!”

  Nose-ring boy laughed. “Cheer up, babe! Better than nothing!” He slapped Abby on the backside.

  She rounded on him. “Get out!”

  His grin spread. “Y’know, my friends are still a little hungry. Maybe they’ll stay a while and you and me can—”

&nb
sp; A soft but clear voice from behind him said, “Maybe you’d better do as she says.”

  Nose-ring turned to see a tall African-American teenage boy staring at him from the counter. “What’s it got to do with you, beanpole? You can just—” Nose-ring boy’s mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. He paused, frowned. Tried to say something else. His eyes grew wide and he looked like he was on the edge of a panic attack.

  His puzzled friends clustered around him. “Marlon, what’s wrong? Are you choking?”

  He shook his head, pointed at his throat, and mouthed the words, “I can’t speak!”

  Abby glanced around the diner. Everyone was staring, but as she looked toward the counter the tall, slim teenager was hastily turning away—Abby was sure he was trying to hide a grin.

  What was that? Did he do something?

  Nose-ring—who looked like he was on the verge of tears—was quickly led out of the diner by his friends.

  The slim boy was sitting at the counter with a half-eaten burger in his hands and a copy of Record Collector open in front of him.

  Abby kept watch on him as she cleaned up the vacated booth and wiped down the table. The boy seemed to be completely immersed in the magazine: Even after she had seated the next customers and taken their orders he was still on the same page. Either he was a very slow reader or he wasn’t actually reading at all.

  She moved around to the far side of the counter, and stopped in front of him on the pretext of washing some glasses. “Interesting article?”

  He looked up. “Hmm?”

  Abby guessed he was a little older than her. He had a thin build, but large hands and wide shoulders that suggested he wasn’t done growing yet. His hair was close-cropped, and his skin was almost as dark as hers. He had the beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip. Abby realized now that she had seen him at the diner before, many times, and he’d always been alone, always sitting in the same spot and ordering the same food.

  “What you’re reading,” Abby said. “Interesting, is it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is. If you’re into synthesizers and drum machines.”

  “Let me guess. You’ve got a band.” She glanced down at his long fingers. “And you play the keyboard.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “Nope.” He raised the magazine. “This is the closest I’ve got to a real musical instrument.”

  She nodded in the direction of the corner booth. “Thanks for sticking up for me. But that was strange, wasn’t it?”

  He looked around. “What was strange?”

  “The way that guy’s voice just cut out. Sudden onset of laryngitis or something.”

  The boy shrugged. “Could be the flu. Nearly everyone else has it.”

  Abby considered this. “Right.” Better not push him, she decided. If he did do something to that guy’s voice then he’s not going to admit it.

  The boy suddenly sat upright, looked up toward the TV in the corner. The sound was off, but the picture showed the newly constructed power plant twelve miles away.

  A line of scrolling text across the bottom of the screen read “. . . superhero Max Dalton believed to be one of the hostages. Police have cordoned off the area and are . . .”

  The boy jumped to his feet, tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “Got to go. Keep the change.”

  Before Abby could even respond, he was out the door and running down the street. Mandy appeared next to Abby and made a grab for the twenty. “Oh, big tipper!”

  Normally Abby would have snatched the money out of her hand. Instead, she was staring at the TV screen. “What is all this?”

  “Oh yeah. It was on the radio. Bunch of terrorists attacked the new power plant. Cops all over the place. And the guy said that Max Dalton got captured or something.”

  “Dave’s out back, right?” Abby pulled off her apron and pushed through the double doors. The manager was sitting on the back step sipping out of a mug. “Dave? I’ve got to go home for a couple of hours.”

  “Aw, you’re kidding, right? Abby, we’re swamped! All the kids are coming in tonight because their parents are too sick to make dinner.”

  She folded her arms and glared at him. “Swamped? Dave, you’ve been out here for ages, and Mandy only works about twenty minutes out of every hour. I’ve been going for eleven straight hours—I haven’t even had my lunch yet!”

  Dave sighed, pushed himself to his feet, and carried his mug back into the kitchen. Over his shoulder, he said, “All right, all right. Be back by . . . nine, OK?”

  “I’ll do my best.” She closed the door on him.

  Abby looked around to make sure that no one could see her, then made her way to the far side of the yard. An old wooden shed was slowly rotting in the corner, half-hidden among the piles of junk. She pulled open the door and ducked inside. Under a large, paint-spattered plastic sheet was a rusty oil drum with its lid hammered into place so tightly that nothing short of a crowbar would be able to open it.

  She popped the lid with her fingers, and one by one removed the items she’d been storing for exactly this sort of situation.

  First came the heavy boots she’d bought at the local army surplus store. Next the builders’ gloves. Then the extra-thick black denim jeans and the leather biker’s jacket that the would-be robber had left behind.

  She quickly stripped off her uniform and pulled everything on. She’d spent months modifying the jacket and jeans. A visit to the local hardware store and almost a whole week’s tips had provided her with hundreds of steel washers, each about the size of a quarter. A scavenging session at the local dump had yielded a dozen yards of piano wire.

  She’d threaded the washers onto the jacket and jeans with the wire to create her own homemade chain mail.

  When she zipped up the jacket, Abby took a moment to consider what she was about to do. Her heart was thumping like crazy and she’d already broken out in a sweat.

  She was a superhuman. She was stronger and faster than an ordinary person, she had tremendous stamina, and she had some sort of strange ability to manipulate metal—even though she didn’t quite understand that part herself.

  I’ve got to do this, she told herself. If Max Dalton really has been captured, I might be able to help.

  Her hands trembled with anticipation and no small amount of fear as she reached into the oil drum and removed the last two items.

  The first was a secondhand full-face motorcycle helmet.

  The second had once been a three-foot-long solid steel bar. Abby had spent a week hammering it flat so that its cross section was a narrow ellipse rather than a circle. She’d fashioned a handgrip from a strip of rubber cut from a car tire and bound it to one end of the bar with piano wire. Then she’d sharpened one edge, brought it to a point at the top.

  She slung the heavy sword into the specially made sheath on the back of her jacket, then pulled on her helmet.

  She opened the door to the shed, peeked out to make sure that there was still no one watching, then closed the door behind her.

  The back wall was seven feet high. Abby vaulted over it, landed lightly on her feet in the alley, and ran.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lance McKendrick knocked on the door of his parents’ bedroom and pushed it open.

  His mother was asleep, the blankets pulled right up to her neck. His father was hunched over on the side of the bed in his pajamas and the thick dressing gown he’d stolen from a hotel, blowing his nose on a tissue.

  “How are you doing, Dad?”

  Albert McKendrick turned dark-rimmed, bloodshot eyes toward his son and shrugged. “Lousy. Feel like I’ve been run over by a truck delivering bowling balls.” He sniffed. “Back’s killing me, and when I try to stand up I get dizzy. Half the time I’m freezing; the other half I’m soaked with sweat.” He wiped his mouth with a fresh tissue. It shredded on his two-day stubble and left his chin and upper lip covered with tiny particles of paper. “Where’s Cody?”

  “Training. He should be back in about
an hour. Will you guys be OK on your own until then?”

  His father nodded, then sneezed. “God, I hate being sick.”

  Lance returned to his own room and pulled the small briefcase out from under the bed. It had been locked, but that had been easily sorted out with his homemade tension wrench and half-diamond pick.

  He was disappointed to discover that the briefcase was almost empty. All it contained was two sheets of paper filled with dense columns of numbers and a small envelope holding an electronic keycard. The envelope had a local address written on the front, and a seven-digit phone number on the back.

  Lance had spent the past couple of hours wondering what to do next. He was almost certain that the briefcase was what Paragon had been looking for. But why? Who was the guy driving the car?

  I should hand this stuff over to the cops. But if I do that now, they’ll want to know why I didn’t do it earlier. And if they guess I picked the locks, I’ll be in real trouble.

  I could say I just found it. I went back to Jade Avenue and I spotted the briefcase in the Sternhams’ hedge.

  But he knew that wouldn’t work: The police would have thoroughly searched the area.

  He went downstairs, grabbed the local phone directory, and brought it back to his room. The back cover folded out into a map: Lance found the address in the middle of the business park. He knew the area quite well—he’d run a couple of scams on some of the businesses there.

  From the direction the car had been heading, the driver must have been leaving the park when Paragon spotted him.

  Does that mean that Paragon didn’t know where the place is? Would the guy have told him by now?

  Lance realized that deep down he’d already decided what he was going to do. He put the empty briefcase back under the bed, stuffed the pages into his backpack, then put the keycard and the envelope into his jacket pocket.