I arched up into the sky to gain more altitude. Then, I flipped around in midair, holding Iceburn in front of me like a nail about to be hammered. Flying as fast as I could, I rocketed straight down toward the ground. Everything around me became a blur as the ground rushed up to greet us.
We hit the ground like a ton of dropped bricks. It sounded and felt like a bomb going off. Incredibly, even through my shield, I felt some of the force of it. If it had not been for that shield, I no doubt would have been smashed like a bug hitting the windshield of a speeding car.
Instead, I was thrown clear of the point of impact. I sailed backward through the air almost parallel to the ground, barely conscious, my cape fluttering behind me. I hit the ground back-first. Everything in my body exploded with pain. It felt like fireworks were going off in my brain right behind my eyes. I skidding for several feet before slowing to a painful stop. It felt like someone had ripped the flesh off my back like it was old wallpaper. The pain from it made me realize I must have dropped my shield in my semi-conscious state after hitting the ground with Iceburn.
All I wanted to do was to close my eyes and go to sleep. Or, more likely, pass out. The temptation was almost irresistible, like a siren song. No! There would be time for that later. I forced my eyes open. I struggled to my feet. I collapsed a couple of times. Finally, I managed to stay standing. It reminded me of what some really old people looked like when they tried to stand up. My legs were like jello. Everything hurt. If this was what getting old felt like, I would happily take a pass on becoming elderly.
I looked for Iceburn. Though I did not see him, there was a hole in the ground near the rubble from the buildings I had blown up. I slowly and cautiously staggered over to it. I was in no condition to fight more, but I would do what I had to do.
Iceburn lay in the bottom of the shallow hole. It was more of a crater, really. It was about two feet deep. Iceburn, his costume in tatters, was face-up. One of his legs was folded under him and bent at a weird angle. The whiteness of his femur was exposed through his skin. His mask was mostly gone, exposing white skin, sandy blonde hair, and his eyes. His eyes were open. He did not move. I thought he was dead until his eyes shifted to look at me. He blinked a couple of times, focusing on me with obvious effort.
“I think my back’s broken, kid,” he whispered hoarsely through split and bloody lips. “Can’t move. Can’t feel my legs and arms at all.”
I did not trust Iceburn any more than I would trust a rattlesnake. While keeping an eye on Iceburn, I quickly glanced around. I picked up a nearby fist-sized rock with my powers. It tapered to a point, like a knife a caveman might have fashioned back in the Stone Age. I brought it over so that it hovered over Iceburn. I forcefully dropped it, pushing it through the skin and flesh of Iceburn’s unbroken leg. Blood spurted out like a geyser. Iceburn did not move or otherwise react. He did not even cry out. He apparently had been telling me the truth. Would wonders never cease?
Iceburn watched all this like he was watching it happen to someone else.
“Trust but verify, huh kid?” he croaked.
“I’d sooner trust the Devil,” I said.
I floated a piece of the buildings’ rubble over, this one about the length of a loaf of bread and maybe three times as wide. I stepped down into the crater. My legs screamed at me in protest. I knelt down, straddling Iceburn’s broken body. I lifted my arms overhead. With my powers, I lowered the piece of rubble into my hands. I released my power’s hold. I almost dropped the piece of rubble. I was exhausted and it was heavy. More than heavy enough to do the job.
I wanted to smash Iceburn’s head in like it was an eggshell. No, I did not just want to do it. I ached to do it. I needed to do it.
And yet, I hesitated.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him two or three times, savoring each time. I wanted to squeeze the life out of him like juicing an orange. I wanted to take his body apart piece by piece and spread the bloody bits so far and wide that the police would have to pick him up with tweezers. I wanted to erase him from the face of the Earth so thoroughly that God Himself would have a hard time locating his soul, assuming he even had one.
And yet, I hesitated.
It hit me like a thunderbolt from heaven. I suddenly realized why I had felt so terribly when I had thought I had killed Iceburn by collapsing those buildings on him. If I killed him, I would never become a Hero. And, I desperately wanted to be one. Because of my training, I had met and become a part of a new family. Amazing Man, Myth, and Smoke were but its immediate members. My extended family included all the other graduates from the Academy, plus all the licensed Heroes who existed, both famous and not famous. If I killed Iceburn, I would never become one of them. Nor should I be allowed to become one. Heroes had too much power to be allowed to use it unchecked and without limits. The Heroes at the Academy had told me that over and over. They were right.
Killing Iceburn would make me feel better. It would certainly make the world better. Of that I had no doubt. But would killing him make me be better? “Vengeance is when you seek revenge on someone by stabbing yourself in the soul.” Dad used to say that. Another of his Jamesisms. I guess I paid a lot more attention to them than I had thought.
Iceburn had said when we were in Adams Morgan that I was starting to remind him of himself. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be like the Old Man. He did not kill his sister’s and niece’s murderer even though he could have. I especially wanted to be like my old man, my father. He had been a good Christian man. A lot of people called themselves Christians. Their every word was God, God, God, yet all their deeds were foul, foul, foul. Unlike those so-called Christians, Dad had always walked the walk instead of just talking the talk. He worked hard, loved his neighbor as he did himself, and said what he meant and meant what he said. He also turned the other cheek. I had seen him do it countless times. He had counseled me to do the same to the Three Horsemen, and to John Shockey when he had betrayed me by lying about me.
Dad had not had powers. That did not make him any less of a hero. He was my hero. Always had been. What would he do in this situation?
Iceburn saw my hesitation. His eyes looked puzzled.
“What the hell are you waiting for, kid? End it. To the victor belong the spoils. If I were you, I’d have bashed my skull in already.”
His words removed all doubt about what I needed to do.
With an effort, I threw the piece of rubble away from me. I slowly stood up.
Iceburn’s stared at me like he could not believe his eyes.
“You’ve got me at your mercy and you don’t have the cojones to finish the job? You really are a prize idiot, aren’t you?” he said. His tone was contemptuous.
I shrugged. The movement hurt.
“Probably,” I said. “But I’m also a Hero. Or at least I’d like to be.”
I used my communicator to call the police. I did it quickly, before I could change my mind.
30
To say the Old Man was pissed at me would be an understatement. If I was a famous and respected Hero who returned from a mission in space to find one of my Apprentices languishing in a Washington, D.C. jail, I guess I would be pissed too.
The police took Iceburn into custody once they arrived at the scene of my battle with him. They took me into custody too. The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia charged me with multiple counts of unauthorized use of Metahuman abilities, plus several counts of destruction of property. I cooled my heels in city lockup until Amazing Man got back from space and retained a lawyer to get me out. While I waited in jail, I ran across some guys who were there thanks to me and my crime-busting spree in D.C. By “ran across,” I mean they tried to punch my lights out. One guy even tried to stab me in the stomach with a shiv. Fun times. After the first few fights—which I won without using my powers as I was in enough trouble as it was—the D.C. Department of Corrections moved me to solitary confinement. I did not mind s
olitary. It gave me plenty of quiet time to think. Besides, it was nice to go to sleep without having to keep one eye open out of fear of getting jumped.
Mr. Sawyer, the lawyer the Old Man hired, eventually got me released on my own recognizance pending my trial in light of the fact I did not have a criminal record. Mr. Sawyer told me he was pretty sure I would not wind up going to trial at all. He thought the U.S. Attorney would eventually drop most of the charges, if not all of them. I had apparently made quite an impression on the public in my attempt to lure Iceburn out into the open. The U.S. Attorney was eyeing running for D.C. mayor, and Mr. Sawyer told me it was unlikely she would want to incur the voting public’s wrath by prosecuting someone as popular as I apparently now was. Plus, Senator Gomez himself got into touch with my lawyer and offered to lean on the U.S. Attorney to get her to drop the charges. I guess what they said was true: It was nice to have friends in high places. Not too long ago, I hardly had any friends at all in either high or low places. A lot had changed since then.
Speaking of friends, the first thing Isaac asked when I got out of jail was whether I had gone “gay for the stay.” I answered him by walking up to Neha, grabbing her by the shoulders, and kissing her right on the mouth. She melted into me and kissed me back. I would never forget how good it felt to have her body pressed against mine again. I would never forget the look on Isaac’s face, either.
I had missed both of them during their space mission. However, I had not missed Isaac enough to kiss him on the mouth.
The authorities identified Iceburn by running his prints through several criminal databases. His real name was Jason Sydney. They threw the book at him for the deaths of my father and the people who died in the Oregon wildfire. He was a person of interest in several other murders and crimes as well. Despite prosecutors offering to go a little easier on him if he would disclose who had hired him to kill me, he was not talking.
As it turned out, I had broken Iceburn’s back and paralyzed him from the neck down. The doctors said he would never walk again. If I said I was sorry about that, I would be lying.
Iceburn was just the triggerman. Whoever had hired him to come after me was just as responsible for killing Dad as Iceburn was. They were still very much at large. And, if what Neha had told me was right, they were almost certainly big-time Rogues. That meant whatever I had gotten caught up in was not completely over. But, unlike my earlier plans for Iceburn, I would take down the people who had hired him the right way. The Heroic way. Dealing with them was a mountain I would have to climb later.
I would have to climb it later because I was temporarily barred from using my powers as a condition of my release from jail. Since, as the Old Man put it, “a superhero without powers is like a bird without wings,” he put my Apprenticeship on hold. He told me to take some time off to recuperate from my injuries and to clear my head. Honestly, I had feared he would end my Apprenticeship altogether in light of what I had done while he was off-planet.
“If you think I’m going to unleash on the world a half-trained Omega-level Metahuman who apparently thinks he’s the second coming of Gary Cooper in High Noon, you’ve got another thing coming,” he had said. “You’re staying my Apprentice if for no other reason than so I can keep an eye on you.” I had been so relieved, I did not have the heart to tell him I did not know what High Noon was. Maybe it was a Cheech and Chong movie. Them I had heard of.
My Apprenticeship being on hold was why, early one morning, I found myself on Interstate 95 in a car the Old Man had lent me. I had just begun a nine-hour drive south. Though I wore jeans and a long-sleeved tee shirt, I felt naked without having my Academy uniform and mask on. At the Old Man’s insistence, a stack of history and physics books rode shotgun in the car. Apparently my Apprenticeship being put on hold did not mean I was free from having to hit the books.
And the car the Old Man had lent me? It was a mint condition 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302, dark red with black stripes. As far as I knew it had not been specially modified so it could fly, but it looked and felt like it could. People stared at it as I drove by. It was not a superhero jet, but it was still pretty freakin’ cool.
I was heading home. Or, what used to be home.
The first thing I did when I got back to South Carolina was I stopped at the cemetery where I had buried Dad. It was just a few miles from the farm I had grown up on. Mom was buried here, too. Mom and Dad had decided many years ago they wanted to be buried here and not in the cemetery of their church much further down the road. I think Dad wanted to lie in rest as close to the farm he loved as possible. If it had not been against the law, I would have buried him on the farm itself. His body could have nourished the soil he spent most of his life toiling on. I think he would have liked that. He would not have liked being separated from Mom, though. He had told me more than once she was the only woman he had ever loved. I hoped to one day find someone who looked at me the way my parents had always looked at each other. Neha, maybe. Who knew what the future would bring?
After pulling up the weeds that had sprouted up on their adjoining plots, I stood facing Dad’s headstone. Other than his name and the dates of his birth and death, the headstone simply read “Husband, father, farmer.”
“I hope I did the right thing Dad,” I said aloud to him. “I hope you’re proud of me. You too, Mom.” There was no answer. I had come to realize there rarely was.
I stayed there a little longer in silent contemplation. I did not linger for too long though. “Life is for the living,” Dad had said to me over and over again after Mom had died when he found me depressed and moping. Yet another Jamesism. Now I suspected he had been reminding himself of that as much as he had been teaching me.
I got back into the Old Man’s car. It was not until then that I realized I had made the drive from Maryland to South Carolina completely comfortably, without a second thought about it. Just making the short hour’s drive from here to Columbia used to make me nervous. A lot had changed since then.
I sat in the car for a bit. Visiting Mom and Dad was the main reason I had come back to South Carolina. Now I did not know what to do or where to go. I supposed I could have gone to see Uncle Charles, but I did not think of him as family anymore. The only family I had that mattered was nine hours away.
Itching to see a familiar face, I make the short drive to the University of South Carolina at Aiken. I went into the coffee shop that was attached to the Student Activities Center. I lingered there for hours over a cup of coffee. I spent part of the time reading a novel I had brought along with me. It was the first piece of recreational fiction I had read since entering Hero Academy. It was a science fiction action adventure with lots of improbable twists and turns. It seemed silly in comparison to what I had just been through. The truth really was stranger than fiction.
Other than reading, I spent the other part of my time at the coffee shop people-watching. Most of the people who flowed in and out of the busy shop were strangers to me. A few people I recognized, though. Nobody spoke to me. That was not terribly surprising. It was not as though I had been Mr. Popularity when I had been a student here. Even so, some of the people I recognized seemed to recognize me too, turning to whisper to each other after I saw a flash of recognition in their eyes.
My coffee did to my body what it always does, and eventually I got up to go to the bathroom. As I used the urinal, I realized it was the same bathroom my powers had first manifested themselves in. I had come full circle. That incident with the Three Horsemen here seemed like it happened an eternity ago. It also seemed as if it had happened to a completely different person. Maybe it had.
I washed my hands. The scars from where they had been burned in my fight with Iceburn were almost gone. While I dried them, the door to the bathroom opened. Donovan Byrd, one of the Three Horsemen, walked in. He saw me and stopped in front of the door. Other than us, no one else was in the room.
“People told me they saw you back here, but I didn’t believe it,” Donovan said. He shoo
k his bald head. “I didn’t think you’d have the stones to show your face around here again.” Donovan was just as I remembered him: a tall, muscular, light-skinned black guy with a shaved head.
Donovan very deliberately looked me up and down.
“You’re bigger than when I last saw you,” he said. “Still not big enough.”
“I’ve been eating my Wheaties.”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“Yes.”
“And what the fuck happened to your face?”
“Got into a fight with an electric razor,” I said. “The razor won. They’re mean little suckers.” Iceburn’s water spout shoving me through the insurance agency’s glass had cut my face up pretty badly. With all the stitches that were now in my face, I looked a little like Frankenstein’s monster.
My hands now dry, I dropped my used paper towels into the trash. I stepped toward the door. Donovan barred my path. There was no way around him.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“You’re not leaving here until after I kick your pasty ass,” Donovan said. “I’m going to fuck you up good. You caused me a lot of trouble with that magic shit you did to me the last time. I couldn’t play football for a whole season. Lost my prime chance for the pro scouts to see me.”
“It’s not magic. Regardless, sorry about that,” I said. I was not. “There’s nothing I can do about it now. Move out of the way.”
“No.”
I stepped closer to him, stopping just outside of his reach. Though I had grown since I had last seen Donovan, he was still taller and heavier than I. Regardless, I looked at him with a steady, level gaze.
“Move,” I said, “or be moved.”
I don’t know what it was. Maybe Donovan sensed I was not afraid of him anymore. Maybe he was only as fearless as I remembered him being when he had his friends around to back him up. Or, maybe he saw in my eyes the hardness that was now inside of me. I had changed. I knew it, and maybe he saw it. Regardless of why, he blinked a couple of times. He then looked away. He stepped aside.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 23
