Sentinels

by Darius Brasher

  “I’m just grateful you left your cheerleading skirt at home.”

  “Don’t be jealous of my sexy bow legs.”

  “All right,” I said, realizing I was procrastinating, “back up some and give me room.” As Isaac did so, I started to focus on what I needed to do. Part of my brain supplied me with how many newtons, or units of force, I needed to tip the neutronium spear over based on my earlier estimate of how much it weighed. The number was massive. I had never generated that much force before in my life. Nor did I think I could. The task seemed impossible.

  Then again, what was it Nelson Mandela had said? “It always seems impossible until someone does it.” Easy for him to say. I was no transformative figure the way he was. If he were here, maybe a great man like him could come up with a way to get the job done.

  Unfortunately, Mandela wasn’t here for me to foist the job off on. All I could do was my best.

  I faced the neutronium spear head-on. I raised my personal force field to help protect my body from the external pressure I would soon exert on it. I gathered my will, picturing clearly in my mind what I wanted to do. I wanted to apply a narrow beam of pressure to the top of the spear, like using a pencil to tip over a liter of soda. Simultaneous with applying pressure to the obelisk, I would need to apply an equal amount of force to my body in the opposite direction. It was Newton’s Third Law of Motion in action: To every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s law was why rockets worked even in the vacuum of space—their rocket engines applied thrust, pushing the rocket in the opposite direction of the thrust even though there was no air to push off of. If I applied the tremendous amount of force I needed to the obelisk without simultaneously applying the exact same amount of force to my body in the opposite direction, I’d shove myself into the cavern wall behind me and be smeared like a bug on a windshield.

  I took a deep, calming breath. I was as ready as I was going to be.

  To help me concentrate, I extended my arms toward the neutronium spear. I unleashed the invisible beam of pressure I had visualized in my mind on the top of the spear. At the exact same time, I carefully exerted the same amount of force against the back of my personal shield.

  Phew! I was not thrown backwards through the cavern wall like a shot cannonball. So, I had at least done this part successfully. The obelisk still hadn’t budged an inch, of course, but this small success was heartening considering my disastrous track record recently. Baby steps.

  Time to ramp the force up. I pushed harder and harder against the obelisk, while of course pushing equally hard against myself. It was like slowly turning a faucet handle and unleashing more and more water pressure. Soon, the faucet was all the way open. I was pushing as hard against the spear as I was capable.

  From Isaac’s perspective, my struggle against the spear was no doubt soundless. From my perspective, things were anything but. My heart pounded so hard, it felt like it would burst right out of my chest. My head, already hurting from my encounter with Mechano, ached even more painfully, as if I had stuck it into an ever-tightening vise. My blood roared in my ears. My body started to shake, as if I were standing in the epicenter of an earthquake. I pushed against the obelisk as hard as I thought I could, exerting more of my power against it than I had ever used on anything before. The amount of force I brought to bear on the neutronium spear would swat a jumbo jet out of the air like it was a paper airplane.

  The obelisk did not move one iota. I could have been tickling the damned thing with a feather for all the good I was doing.

  It was no use. I had failed. Again. You would think I would be used to it by now. I’d been getting lots of practice lately.

  I was about to give up.

  But then, I got mad. Being rejected by Neha, getting Hannah killed, not being able to find Antonio, not knowing how to deal with the Sentinels and then having to run from them when I finally found the balls to confront them, feeling overwhelmed by life in the big city . . . I was heartily sick of being a loser, of feeling like I was too small of a person to deal with the big issues I had to grapple with. Was I just some dumb hick from South Carolina who was incapable of rising to the occasion? Or, was I the Omega? How was I supposed to save the world if I couldn’t knock over a stupid rock?

  No! No more failures. No more running away. No more being a loser. It would end today. One way or another.

  I knew my body couldn’t take much more of this stress. My outstretched arms hurt, as if someone who got heavier by the second sat on top of them. They felt like they’d snap under the strain. It didn’t matter. Pain didn’t matter. The pressure and stress on my body didn’t matter. If I couldn’t best an inanimate object, what chance did I have against the Sentinels? I was going to either move this damned neutronium spear, or die trying. If the latter, maybe the Omega spirit would find a worthier host the next time. Good luck to him or her, plus my most heartfelt condolences. I hoped the next Omega knew better than to let his father and friends be killed.

  I dug deeper. I hit reserves of strength that, frankly, I didn’t even know I had. The pressure against the obelisk increased. The pressure on my body increased as well. My head throbbed, feeling like it would explode. My ears popped with sharp stabs of pain. Wetness trickling out of them and down my neck. Isaac yelled something, wanting me to stop. I could only faintly hear him, like he was shouting down to me after I had fallen into a deep, dark well. I tasted blood. My nose bled, making it hard to breathe. It was just as well. My lungs were on fire anyway. Who cared? Not me. Everybody knew oxygen was overrated.

  I had zoomed right past exhaustion, and rapidly approached collapse. My body cried uncle.

  Screw you, I thought to my body. You’re not the boss of me. I kept going. I shut out the shrieks and complaints of my flesh. The Mountain, Isaac, everything around me, the entire universe seemed to fade out of existence. There was only me and the neutronium spear. My dark nemesis.

  My power surged out of me at levels like I had never experienced before.

  Move, I demanded of my nemesis.

  It didn’t. My jaw clenched so tight, I was vaguely aware of teeth cracking. Mine, I guess. Not the indestructible Mechano ones, presumably. He could go screw himself too. My too-eager-to-throw-in-the-towel, bitch-ass body and Mechano could have a go screw yourself orgy together. As long as they kept me out of it, I didn’t care.

  Move!

  My dark nemesis still didn’t. It was proving to be as stubborn as I was. Maybe it would be the new Omega.

  Move!!! It had become a mantra. My vision blurred and darkened, like a computer screen that was about to die.

  I couldn’t see it, but I felt it—the tiniest bit of movement in the neutronium spear. A slight tremor, like when the guy you’re arm wrestling is weakening.

  Move!!!

  Finally, incredibly, unexpectedly, it did. The neutronium spear slowly tipped out of the vertical like a falling domino. Once it was clear it was going to fall, I shut off my powers, relieving the skull-crushing pressure on my mind. I slumped to my knees, hunched over, feeling like a melted candle. I hadn’t realized that only my powers had been holding me up toward the end of my struggle.

  Son of a bitch! I had pulled it off.

  The neutronium spear hit the floor with a crash they might have heard back in Astor City. A crack split open in the rock floor from the point of impact all the way to the far wall. It was as if a giant had come along and pulled the floor apart like it was two halves of a grapefruit. The entire cavern shook, as if a monstrous earthquake had hit. The rock under and around us rumbled. I more felt them than heard them. Though not completely deaf, my ears weren’t working correctly. Isaac shouted something. I couldn’t figure out what between my defective ears and the rumbling.

  Isaac in his angel form dove into me, shoulder first, like a football player tackling a defenseless receiver. Something inside of me cracked. A rib maybe. I was flung to the side, hitting the ground back first. My body exploded with fresh pain, proving that
you could make water wetter. I slid for a bit on the smooth rock surface with Isaac on top of me. An instant later, one of the fragments of the V’Loth ship hit the floor right where I had just been kneeling. If I had still been there, it would’ve brained me. Obviously it had been shaken loose from its mooring by the faux earthquake.

  Isaac lay on top of me with his huge white wings folded around me, shielding me from falling bits of rock from the cavern’s ceiling. He stayed there, wrapped around me protectively, until the rumbling around us lessened and then finally died off entirely.

  “If someone walked in on us right now, we’d have a hard time convincing them we’re not actually boyfriends like I told your boss,” Isaac said into my ear once the shaking and rattling ended. Thanks to whatever was wrong with my ears, I barely heard him.

  “You saved my life. Thanks.” I spit out a tooth chip. My throat felt like I had gargled with glass shards. It hurt to talk. It hurt to everything.

  “No. I saved your life again. I’ve done it before, remember?”

  Isaac’s weight was on my chest. “Grateful, but can’t breathe,” I rasped.

  “Oh! Sorry.” Isaac scrambled to his feet. Bits of rock and other debris sloughed off his broad wings and back, pattering like rain on the hard floor. The pressure on my chest lessened, but was not gone. Isaac shimmered and changed from his bare-chested angel form back into his usual self. Other than a gash on his cheek, he seemed none the worse for wear. I wished I could say the same. I felt like a dishrag that had been wrung dry, had holes shot through it, and then set on fire, with the resulting ashes then ground to a fine powder.

  “Myth’s my name, saving Omegas is my game,” Isaac said as he brushed himself off. Despite his flippant words, Isaac seemed awestruck by what I had managed to do to the neutronium spear. The look on his face told me he was for the first time taking seriously the notion that I was the Omega. “You okay? You look worse than you did when we came here, and that’s saying something.”

  “Been better.” This was one of those times I wished Isaac didn’t talk so much. My ears hurt, not to mention everything else. It was hard to hear. It was hard concentrating on anything other than breathing. If it weren’t for the fact moving hurt too much, I would be writhing in pain right now. “Think you broke a rib.”

  “Better a broken rib than a broken neck.” Isaac glanced over at the fallen neutronium spear. “I’ve gotta admit I’m pretty impressed with you right now. You moved the damned thing. Shall we go see what awaits us under the Christmas tree?”

  Since I could not get up on my own, all I could do was nod weakly. Isaac bent over and helped me to my feet. Though I felt like I had been broken and then pieced back together again by a five-year-old with string and Silly Putty, with assistance, I could walk.

  Supported by Isaac, I hobbled over to where the neutronium spear lay on its side. A zigzagging crack a couple of feet deep and several inches wide ran from where the spear had fallen all the way to the distant wall the tip of it pointed at. The crack looked like the Grand Canyon in miniature.

  The spear overturned revealed a cavity in the floor several inches deep right under where the flat base of the spear had once rested. Lying inside the cavity was a red cape, folded into a square with military precision. Though it looked just like the capes hanging from the mannequins, this had to be what we had been looking for. Why else would Avatar hide it under the neutronium spear?

  “Help me down,” I said weakly to Isaac. He lowered me to my knees. Blood dripped from my face, splattering the floor. A wave of nausea and vertigo washed over me, almost making me topple, before I steadied myself against Isaac’s leg.

  My hand shook with a combination of nerves, excitement, and pain as I extended it toward the folded cape. Though my experiences with the other capes made me halfway expect nothing to happen, I still felt the way King Arthur must have felt when he tried to pull Excalibur from the stone. Assuming Arthur had been shoved into a burlap bag and beaten with sticks first.

  My hand touched the cape. The light of a thousand suns exploded right in front of my eyes. Isaac, The Mountain, and everything else were swept away like dust before a broom.

  I fell over, into oblivion.

  CHAPTER 22

  The plan had gone to complete shit.

  The smoke from Baltimore’s burning buildings below rose in thick, dark, hot, toxic plumes. It got into my eyes, partly blinding me. I tried to blink away my sweat and the smoke-induced irritation. My hard blinks almost made me miss a silver V’Loth spaceship emerging from the smoke right in front of me, like a shark out of the murky depths of the ocean.

  Knowing from prior experience my force fields would protect me from direct impacts with the ships but were entirely useless against the V’Loths’ energy missiles, I darted down and to the left in the air. A glowing energy pulse from the ship missed me by inches, and was swallowed by the surrounding smoke. The near miss singed my right side, even with my protective Kinetic suit on. A howl of pain escaped my lips. It was like being branded with a giant red-hot poker.

  The tiny device lodged in my ear buzzed with angry static, setting my teeth on edge. It was a combination transmitter and receiver designed by Mechano which was supposed to allow us Heroes to coordinate our attack on the V’Loths. Its frequencies were no doubt being jammed by the aliens. Though there were Heroes all around me in the smoke, with our communications down, I might as well have been alone.

  The buzzing in my ear mingled with the faint screams of other Heroes, the high-pitched whines of countless V’Loth ships as they cut through the air, the bone-rattling explosions all around me, and the crackling fires below. It was a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.

  Yeah, there was no doubt about it:

  The plan had gone to complete shit.

  * * *

  Nothing had gone well ever since the V’Loth ships had unexpectedly appeared in the sky over every major city on the planet weeks ago. The date they had shown up—August 12, 1966—would no doubt be a date which would live in infamy. Assuming humanity itself lived.

  For fifteen days the V’Loth ships had hung in the sky, completely motionless, like they had been painted there. None of us knew at the time that V’Loth was the name of their species. That knowledge came later. When they appeared, the V’Loths had ignored all attempts at communication by the United Nations and the world’s governments. Even when the Soviet Union’s fighter jets opened fire on the spaceships hovering over Moscow—a proud people, the Soviets always have had more machismo than prudence—the spaceships ignored the jets’ missiles like a sleeping giant would ignore gnats. The missiles did no more damage to the spaceships than a water balloon would do to a tank.

  After the initial excitement and fear wore off, people got used to the alien ships hanging in the sky. They became as much of a fixture there as the sun, the moon, or the stars from whence the V’Loths had apparently come. Politicians debated endlessly about what to do. They wound up doing nothing. That was hardly new. For most of humanity, life returned to normal.

  Humanity’s endless adaptability was why we had become the dominant species on Earth. I and many other Heroes were still nervous every time we looked up at the spaceships, though. We had seen too much over the years to be blasé about the hovering objects. There was talk about banding together into some sort of Heroes’ Guild for the purpose of building a space station to warn us if another group of aliens approached Earth. Mechano apparently had even begun the design work on it. Though it wasn’t a bad idea, building a space station after the V’Loths’ arrival struck me as being like locking the barn door after the horse had already been stolen.

  No one knew what the V’Loths were doing as their still ships hovered silently. Napping, perhaps, tired after their journey across the stars. Monitoring American television and trying to make heads or tails out of The Beverly Hillbillies, maybe.

  Or, more likely as it turned out, deciding on the best way to wipe out humanity root and branch.

  Hu
manity’s reign as the world’s dominant species ended abruptly sixteen days after the V’Loth ships appeared. Like a switch had been flipped, all the ships around the world abruptly came to life. They launched surgically precise yet devastating energy blasts at the cities below them. Millions were killed, including several Heroes. Millions more were injured.

  In a matter of minutes, the world’s great cities were incapacitated. As the cities were the centers of government, technology, culture, and finance, humanity itself was largely incapacitated. Fortunately, thanks to the United States’ Hero Act of 1945 and similar laws enacted in other countries, the world had Heroes to defend it. Unfortunately, the V’Loths easily defeated the Heroes who took them on. With the world’s various governments crippled, our Heroic counterattacks against the V’Loths were too haphazard and uncoordinated. A guild of Heroes which could organize our defense efforts looked like an even better idea than before, but it was too late for that now. The milk had already been spilled.

  It took several days, far longer than it would have we had some sort of centralized organization, but many of the surviving Heroes from around the world met to try to figure out what to do about the V’Loth threat. I and my wife Neha, aka the Hero Smoke, of course attended. While there, Laser Lass told us all she had heard of a kid in Nebraska whose telepathic powers had recently manifested thanks to him hitting puberty. He allegedly had tapped into the V’Loths’ minds and could provide intelligence on them.

  Being desperate to find anything that would help us combat the V’Loths, a couple of Heroes were dispatched to look into the kid. It turned out that the 13-year-old boy wasn’t a dead end as we suspected he might be. Telepaths were as uncommon as hen’s teeth, after all. The vast majority of people who claimed they were telepathic were either frauds, con men, or crazy. But this kid was the real deal. His name was Vaughn Hope. Fitting, because Vaughn was our last, best hope to defeat the alien menace.