by Lucas Flint
“Good,” I said. “I’m ready to leave when you are.”
“Okay,” said Valerie. “When I say so, I want you to smash through the glass window. With the electricity off, it should be easy for you to break through.”
“Smash through the window,” I said, glancing at the window in front of me. “Gotcha.”
I took a stance to get ready to run as Valerie went silent. The anticipation building up inside of me made me really impatient to go, but I stayed where I was supposed to, listening carefully for Valerie’s signal to go.
Then, one second later, Valerie said, “The facility’s security systems are now down. Go!”
I immediately jumped toward the window with my foot out. My foot smashed through the window, totally shattering it upon impact and sending glass flying everywhere. But I protected my face from the worst of it by covering my face with my hands, though when I landed on the floor, a few shards poked the soles of my feet.
But as soon as my feet touched the floor, I ran toward the exit. I ripped open the door—literally ripping it off its hinges—and found myself in a long hallway that extended extremely far, though the hall curved out of sight at the end. It reminded me of the Cavern, the base of the New Heroes, but I didn’t stop and stare at it for very long.
I started running down the hallway, but when I got only a couple of steps in, one of the doors up ahead burst open and three guards carrying guns spilled out of it. Because the hallway was fairly narrow, they were able to block my path and they aimed their guns at me, which I realized were guns modified to shoot powerless pellets, rather than normal bullets.
The guards immediately began firing on me, but with my super speed, I was able to dodge the pellets, which exploded into small clouds of powerless gas wherever they hit. One almost hit me, passing overhead so close that I could feel it passing through my hair, but I was too fast and nimble for the guards to get a good lock on me even in this narrow hallway.
Reaching the guards, I kicked the guns out of their hands. I then punched one of the guards, knocking him out in an instant, but the other two drew extremely large knives from their sides and slashed at me. I dodged the knives, however, and quickly took them both out with a couple of good blows to the heads. But even before those two guards fell, I was already running down the hallway, hoping I wouldn’t run into any other guards on my way out. But I did stop, grab one of the fallen guns, and removed some of the powerless pellets from it, because I had a feeling they could be useful, and then I resumed running again.
Rounding a corner, I found myself standing in a wide-open room that appeared to be the main lobby of the facility. There was an elevator on the far side, which I assumed would take me to the surface, while a desk that had apparently been abandoned stood to my left, opposite some nice couches that looked oddly out of place in this facility.
But the oddest part of the lobby area was the large pile of sand in the center. I mean, it was huge, maybe about half my height. I had no idea where it was from or how it got there, but before I could go any farther, the sand pile began to move.
Before my astonished eyes, the sand pile started to grow and change shape. It rapidly took on the form of a man, looking at first like a man made of sand before it became more detailed. Soon, a grown man was now standing before me, a patch on his left shoulder identifying him as agent of the G-Men. He also had a long ponytail and looked kind of like a Native American, though it was hard to tell what his race was, exactly.
“Who are you?” I said. “Let me guess, Sandy?”
The G-Men agent laughed. “Good one, but no. I’m Sandstorm, the Commander of this particular facility. We’ve never met before, but I’ve heard all about you, Bolt.”
“Yeah, lots of people have,” I said. “But I don’t really have time to stick around and chat with fans. So if you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you would move out of the way and let me escape.”
“Me? A fan? Hardly,” said Sandstorm, shaking his head. “But that’s irrelevant. I don’t know how you escaped from your cage, but as the Commander around here, it’s my duty to make sure you don’t escape.”
“You sound an awful lot like Warden Glass,” I said. “He also said it was his duty to make sure I didn’t escape. Then he got … well, shattered.”
“Sand isn’t nearly as fragile as glass, you know,” said Sandstorm. “But enough talking. It’s my duty to take you down no matter what, so get ready to feel a world of pain, boy.”
Sandstorm suddenly launched his fist at me. His fist turned into a sand cannonball, but I dodged it pretty easily by flying into the air.
But then Sandstorm extended his other arm toward me and wrapped it around my leg. Despite being made of sand, Sandstorm’s arm immediately solidified around my leg and he brought me down, smashing me against the floor so hard that I actually cracked the floor upon impact.
Dazed by the impact, I was unable to recover in time to stop Sandstorm’s sand from rapidly covering my whole body. Soon, my arms and legs were encased in solid sand, making it almost impossible for me to move.
“There,” said Sandstorm, a smug grin on his face. “Think you can escape from my sand? Of course not. There’s a reason I was put in charge of this place.”
I struggled to break free again, but Sandstorm wasn’t exaggerating about his strength. Whatever he’d done, the sand was too thick for me to break out of. It felt more like rock than sand, actually, which made it even harder to free myself from.
Instead of giving up, however, I activated my super speed and immediately began vibrating my legs. At first, the thick sand made it almost impossible to move my legs, but slowly, my legs began to break through the sand, until they soon completely shattered the sand holding me down.
Sandstorm was taken aback by this. He took a step backwards and said, in a shocked voice, “What the hell? How did you do that?”
I jumped to my feet and hurled a punch at him, but Sandstorm’s body immediately turned into sand, causing my fist to punch harmlessly through the hole he had created in his chest.
Taken by surprise, I was unable to dodge a punch coming from him. But his fist was solid, rather than sand, so when it hit, it hurt just as much as a normal punch would. The blow even sent me staggering, but Sandstorm grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me to the floor.
Briefly stunned by the blow, I nonetheless managed to roll out of the way just in time to avoid Sandstorm’s hand, which was in the form of hammer-shaped sand and smashed against the floor where I’d been lying. I fired a lightning bolt at Sandstorm, but he just formed a large hole in his body that allowed the lightning bolt to pass through harmlessly and strike the wall behind him.
“Nice shot,” said Sandstorm as the hole in his body closed. “But not nice enough.”
Sandstorm suddenly collapsed into a pile of sand that immediately began rolling toward me. In seconds, the sand pile was around my feet, burying my feet ankle deep in the stuff. I tried to pull my feet out of the sand, but it solidified around my ankles, making it almost impossible to escape.
Then Sandstorm’s upper body rose from the sand and he punched me in the face, this time with a hand that was more sand-like than fleshly. The blow hit me hard enough that it would have knocked me over under ordinary circumstances, but because his sand was keeping me upright, all it did was knock me back awkwardly before I regained my balance.
Sandstorm just pummeled me with punch after punch, each blow hitting me hard. I raised my arms to block most of the attacks, but they still came far too quickly for me to defend against effectively. It didn’t help that sand kept getting into my eyes and mouth, which made it hard to concentrate and focus on escaping.
But then, all of a sudden, the sand loosened around my ankles, causing me to slip on the floor and land on my back. Once more, Sandstorm rapidly covered my body with a thick pile of sand, which was both heavy and rapidly solidifying.
Instead of just lying down and taking it, however, I activated my flight powers and
, combining it with my super speed, burst out of the sand again. I flew over to the other side of the room and landed just as Sandstorm reformed into his humanoid form, a look of triumph on his face.
“Running away?” said Sandstorm. “You know there’s nowhere for you to run. I’m going to win no matter what.”
As much as I hated to admit it, Sandstorm had a good point. I hadn’t even landed one blow on Sandstorm yet, but he’d already hit me multiple times with several strong attacks. His sand powers were the problem, because with them he was able to avoid most of my attacks. Unless I could figure out how to negate his powers, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to win this fight.
Wait … negate his powers. I remembered removing a few powerless pellets from the guns that the guards that had attacked me with earlier. I still had them on my body, in my pockets, and an idea for using them was already forming in my mind.
“No witty comebacks?” said Sandstorm. “Odd, since you superhero types always have witty comebacks. But hey, I’m not complaining. I prefer action over talk anyway.”
Sandstorm launched another flying sand fist at me, but I activated my super speed and, dodging his attack, ran toward Sandstorm. Even as I ran, I could tell that he thought I was going to punch him, but I was still much faster than him and expected to take him down before he realized what happened.
As I ran, I pulled the powerless pellets out of my pockets and hurled my other fist at Sandstorm’s chest. He immediately created a hole in his chest where my fist would go through, but at the last second I dropped my fist and instead hurled the pellets at Sandstorm’s face.
A brief look of surprise appeared on Sandstorm’s face before the pellets hit him in the forehead. Small clouds of yellow gas immediately exploded into existence around his head, causing Sandstorm to gasp and cough, but I could tell that the powerless gas was already starting to affect him. The hole in his chest was rapidly closing and he was too distracted by the gas to pay attention to me.
So I punched him in the chest. My fist actually connected, hitting him hard enough to knock him flat off his feet. In fact, I hit him so hard that when he cracked his head against the floor, he immediately stopped moving, though he looked more unconscious than dead.
Panting, I stepped away from Sandstorm and ran over to the elevator. I pressed the ‘1’ button, which I thought would take me to the exit, but then I heard footsteps and looked over my shoulder in time to see more guards round the corner from the hallway and into the lobby. A quick look told me that they were all armed with guns that could shoot powerless pellets, which meant I had to get out of here fast.
So I ripped open the doors to the elevator and flew into the shaft just as the first powerless pellets came flying at me but none of them hit me. I just flew up through the shaft as quickly as I could until I reached the top doors, which I smashed open to discover that I had finally made it outside.
But I didn’t stick around to look at my surroundings. I just flew into the sky, heading into a random direction as far away from the facility as I could.
Chapter Nine
I flew for a couple of hours before I felt safe enough to land. I chose a very well-hidden spot among the trees, which was practically indistinguishable from the rest of the forest from the air. It was also well shaded, too, which was nice after flying in the hot sun like that.
I sat down on a tree trunk, rubbing my head and sighing. My costume had been covered in sand, but the flight had knocked most of it off; still, when I ran my fingers through my hair, I realized that there was still a lot of sand in it. I would have to take a shower at some point to get rid of all of it, but for now, I needed to focus on other things.
I raised my suit-up watch to my mouth and, tapping the screen, said, “Val, are you there?”
“Yes, Kevin, I am,” said Valerie. “I see that you have successfully escaped that government facility.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t easy,” I said. “They had a superhuman named Sandstorm who tried to stop me. Now I really hate sand and don’t want to go to the beach anytime soon.”
“Okay,” said Valerie, who didn’t seem to get my joke about the beach. “What do you want to do next, Kevin?”
I opened my mouth to answer her question, but then stopped and thought about it. There were two important things that I wanted to do: Rescue Blizzard and the others from the government and stop Mastermind from finding the Apocalypse Switch. Both were very urgent for me, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure which one to do first.
On one hand, if Mastermind got his hands on the Apocalypse Switch, that would be worse for the world as a whole. It wouldn’t just affect me, my friends, or even America; every country on the planet would be affected if Mastermind gained control of the Apocalypse Switch. I couldn’t waste even one second hunting him down.
On the other hand, Blizzard and my friends needed help, too. There was no telling what the government was doing to them. Sure, Shade said they were still alive, but that didn’t mean the government was treating them well. The government had already tried to kill Triplet when his investigations led him to almost discovering the truth about White Lightning; why wouldn’t they do it now that they actually had him in their grasp? Besides, I couldn’t abandon my friends, even Ivan and Rime, because they had all aided me in some way and so deserved to be paid back for their help.
I made my decision. “Val, we’re going to rescue my friends first.”
“Really?” said Valerie. “What about Mastermind and the Apocalypse Switch? I am not arguing with you, but that seems important.”
“Only Cadmus Smith knows where the Apocalypse Switch is,” I said. “And, if Shade’s correct, he’s currently in hiding and has yet to be found by Mastermind and probably won’t be for a while. So I’m not too worried about Mastermind finding the Apocalypse Switch.”
“Very well,” said Valerie. “I see your point.”
“Good,” I said. “Now, where are my friends? Did you get the files with the location of the government facility they’re being kept in?”
“Yes,” said Valerie. “It was a bit difficult, but I managed to get the location of Blizzard, Emma, Triplet, Ivan, and Rime.”
“Great,” I said. “Where are they?”
“Underwater,” said Valerie.
“What?” I said. “Underwater? What are you talking about?”
“I mean, they are being kept in the Compound,” said Valerie. “Do you remember that place, Kevin?”
I did. Several months ago, when my former school bully Robert Candle had targeted me and my parents for killing, my parents and I had taken government protection to keep us safe. We were transported to a facility known as the Compound, which was a huge government facility built inside an underwater mountain. It was supposedly the most secure government facility in the world, designed specifically to prevent supervillains from entering it. And it actually had kept me and my parents safe from Robert, so I knew it was the real deal.
But I still had to ask, “The Compound? Why there? That’s not a prison. It’s supposed to be a place where targets of supervillains are kept safe from said supervillains.”
“I don’t know why they were placed down there,” said Valerie. “The files I grabbed didn’t say why. I only know that that is where they are supposed to be.”
I stroked my chin in thought. “So my friends are located deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. How am I supposed to get there? I can’t breathe underwater. Even if I used my super speed to enter, I’d still be at risk of drowning.”
“It is a very complicated conundrum, I agree,” said Valerie. “But I think I may know of a way to do it.”
“Really?” I said. “What is it?”
“I will tell you,” said Valerie. “So listen closely, because in order to get to it, you will need to move fast but carefully.”
-
A few hours of flying later, I landed on an isolated beach on the coast of New York City, on the exact coordinates that Valerie had given me. It had b
een difficult to fly here without being seen; I had had to fly high up in the sky, practically out of sight, avoiding planes, helicopters, and any other flying vehicles that could see me. I don’t think anyone saw me, but it had still been nerve-wracking to fly in the open for so long, because I was sure that someone would spot me and the G-Men would be after me again.
But I’d managed to make it here. It was a very quiet place, with the waves of the ocean gently lapping against the shore, while out further to the sea, waves splashed against some of the larger rocks that stood out of the ocean. There were no people here and it was far from the nearest road, so I didn’t have to worry about being spotted.
“Okay, Val, I’m here,” I said. I looked around. “Where is the box you told me about?”
“It should be buried underneath a tree,” said Valerie. “There should be a large, old oak somewhere nearby that has an ‘X’ carved into its trunk.”
“Large, old oak tree with an ‘X’ carved into its trunk …” I repeated, looking around until I spotted a tree further up the beach that looked like what I was looking for. “I see it.”
I zoomed over to the tree and stopped in front of it. Looking at the tree, I saw that it had an ‘X’ carved into the trunk, just as Valerie described.
“Okay, Val, I found it,” I said. “What do I do now?”
“Check the roots,” Valerie said. “The box should be hidden under its roots.”
I bent over and stuck my hands between the roots of the tree. I worried that I might get bit by a snake or snipped by a crab, but the underside of the tree had no living creatures. My fingers brushed against the sandy, wooden surface of a box, which I then grabbed and pulled out.
Standing upright, I looked down at the box in my hands. It wasn’t very large, but it wasn’t very small, either. It was about twice as large as a shoe box, but looked like an ancient treasure chest left here by pirates a long time ago.
