At first I thought I hadn’t heard right. Then I saw Trey’s eyes. It looked like they were about to bulge out of his head. My mouth dropped open. Since my breath smelled like a sewer, I immediately closed it.
“What do you mean, I passed and he failed?” I asked. It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. “He clearly defeated me. He would’ve killed me if you hadn’t stopped him.”
“Indeed he would have,” Overlord agreed. “That is why I have immobilized him and temporarily nullified his powers. And, that is why he failed. With certain limited exceptions, a Hero does not kill. You all should know that based on your Heroic studies. If someone asks you to kill, even someone with authority over you, you are duty-bound to refuse. Kinetic, not only did you fight Elemental Man, but you spared his life after you had him at your mercy. Since you expected to fail this test by doing so and expected to forgo the opportunity to pursue a Hero’s license, your act of mercy was a great personal sacrifice. That is the sort of person who should be a Hero. Not someone who will kill on command.”
I glanced over at Hitler’s Youth. Dismay filled his eyes.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked Overlord.
“Since Elemental Man demonstrated a willingness to kill, for both his and your safety I will hold him here with my immobilization beam until the proctors come to retrieve him and escort him back to Earth Prime. I have already sent a message to Earth Sigma about the results of the test. As Elemental Man has failed the Trials twice before, with this new failure, he will be forever barred from either receiving his license or using his powers. As for you, you will return to the Heroes’ Guild complex via the Portal and await word of your fifth test.” As soon as Overlord finished speaking, a Portal appeared out of thin air.
I was in disbelief. I hadn’t flunked out. This was incredible.
Before moving toward the Portal, I took one last look at Hitler’s Youth. Though I could scarcely believe it, he was crying. Tears streamed down his face as though he had just learned his best friend had died. I knew how he felt. After all, I had just thought our roles were reversed and that I would be the one leaving the Trials.
Hitler’s Youth was no innocent. He had raped Lilly. He had treated Isaac like he was dirt. And, he had nearly killed me.
Despite all that, I kinda felt sorry for the guy. Not a lot. But a tiny, miniscule, walk a mile in the other man’s moccasins amount.
Dad often said to me that, “Everyone thinks, rightly or wrongly, that they are the heroes of their life story. Remember that when you’re tempted to judge someone. From his perspective, almost everything someone does is perfectly justifiable.”
Why was it a Jamesism—one of my Dad’s life lessons—popped into my head whenever I wanted to hate someone? Maybe you could take the altar boy out of the altar, but not the altar out of the boy.
“Can you ease up a little on your field holding Elemental Man?” I asked Overlord. I hastened to add, “Not enough to let him use his powers or move. Just enough to talk.” Though I felt the tiniest bit sorry for the guy, I didn’t feel sorry enough to let him take another crack at me. Yeah, maybe I was still part-altar boy, but I wasn’t all-the-way stupid.
Overlord’s energy beam flashed white for the briefest of moments.
“Proceed,” it intoned.
I wanted to curse Hitler’s Youth out. Not just for him almost killing me, but also for what he had done to Isaac’s family. But instead, with Dad’s words ringing in my head, I took the high road.
“I just wanted to say I feel bad that you’ve worked so hard and won’t be able to become a Hero. Despite what happened here today, there are no hard feelings,” I said, partly lying through my teeth.
At first I thought Overlord hadn’t freed Hitler’s Youth up to speak. He just glared at me balefully through bloody and teary eyes for several long moments.
Finally, he said something.
“Fuck you, you little country piece of shit!” he hissed hatefully at me. He then fell as silent as a clam again.
What little sympathy I had felt for him disappeared.
“Well that was a cathartic chat,” I said to Hitler’s Youth. “I’m glad we had it. I for one feel a lot better about things.”
I turned and walked toward the Portal.
It took every ounce of willpower I had to not flip Hitler’s Youth the bird as I stepped through the Portal.
21
“Ah yes Kinetic, come on in,” the Hero proctor said. He smiled at me. “You’re right on time I see.”
It was two days after my fight with Hitler’s Youth. Overlord had instructed me to report to this room in the Guild complex for my fifth test.
I had gotten plenty of sleep and rest since I had faced Trey. I no longer felt as ragged as a cheap, overused toy. Even the wounds where the two worms had shot through me were healing nicely.
So physically, I felt pretty good. Mentally was a different story. My wariness meter was now permanently set on High, and it bordered on Freaking The Frak Out. So far, the Trials had made me feel like an abused spouse. Yeah, this Hero was smiling at me now, but what fiendish things would he do to me later?
I cautiously entered the room the Hero invited me into. If a Rogue named Boogeyman leapt from behind the door and tried to stab me in my uninjured buttock, I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit surprised given my track record at the Trials so far. I didn’t know what to expect with this test, but I was dead certain it wasn’t going to be good.
Years ago, when Dad was still alive and I was in high school, I had volunteered at a dog shelter for a few months. There had been a female Rottweiler named Kiara there who had been severely abused by her prior owner. I made a point to visit her each time I went to the shelter, especially because some of the other volunteers were too afraid to deal with a big, scary-looking dog like Kiara. Despite the fact she had come to know me, every time I went to pet her she recoiled from my touch as if I was going to hit her.
That was why, despite the fact this Hero was smiling at me, I half-expected him to pull a cast iron skillet from behind his back and whack me over the head with it.
Maybe I needed to change my name from Kinetic to Kiara.
The Hero asked me to have a seat in the chair in the center of the small room. The padded black and white chair reminded me of a dentist’s patient chair—the part that supported the lower part of your body was almost parallel to the floor, whereas the part supporting your upper body was at a forty-five degree angle from the floor. In fact, the entire office reminded me of a dentist’s office in that it was cold and sterile. If a cute dental hygienist smelling of spearmint and antiseptic came in and started scraping away at my teeth until my gums bled, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If she then tried to knock my teeth out with a baseball bat, that wouldn’t have surprised me either.
Instead of a cute hygienist to take my mind off of whatever new craziness was about to happen to me, all I got was Lotus. That’s what the Hero told me his name was as I settled down in the thickly padded chair. Pain ran from my butt to my brain like an electric current as the chair pressed against the stitches sewn into my rear end. I suppressed a grimace. I didn’t want Lotus to ask me if something was wrong. A worm shot me in the butt, sir, seemed like a less than Heroic thing to say. I wanted to ask Lotus for one of those doughnut-shaped chair pads people with hemorrhoids used, but that seemed like a less than Heroic thing to say as well.
Lotus was a tall, spare man in a green and black costume. His white mask matched the whiteness of his ceremonial Hero’s cape. His eyes had a faraway look to them. It was as if, when he looked at you, he was simultaneously looking somewhere else far away.
That look made me even more nervous than I already was. I shifted a bit in the chair. Between the chair’s soft padding and me practically lying down, I would have been quite comfortable if I hadn’t been as nervous as a virgin in a brothel.
“Where’s the Overlord node?” I asked
Lotus. There was only an Overlord access panel on the wall. There was an access panel in every part of the Guild complex except for the infirmary. Overlord wasn’t allowed to monitor the infirmary out of respect for patient privacy. “There was a node present at all my other tests so far.” I spoke mainly to have something to say. It was hard to stay quiet when you didn’t know what potentially lethal test you would be facing next. Those facing firing squads must have talked people’s ears off. Maybe that’s why they were shot, to shut them up.
“Overlord will not be proctoring this exam. I will be,” Lotus said.
“Oh,” I said. “What am I being tested on?” I hoped it wasn’t my articulateness. In addition to “oh” not being the height of oratory, I wasn’t certain “articulateness” was a word.
Lotus looked down at me and through me with his faraway eyes.
“You’ll see,” he said.
He put his hands on my head like a faith healer laying hands on a congregant. Though I hadn’t been sleepy before, I suddenly felt like I hadn’t slept in a week.
My eyes slammed shut like a closing book.
I awoke in my bed. Amazing Man peered down at me.
No, wait. This wasn’t my bed. And that wasn’t Amazing Man. It was merely an Amazing Man poster mounted on the wall across from me.
I sat up. Bright sunlight shone behind the blinds of the room’s two windows. If I didn’t get up, I was going to be late. But for what, exactly? I was groggy and confused. This was my bed. And yet, it wasn’t. This was my bedroom. And yet, it wasn’t.
This was the bedroom in the brick rancher I had grown up in. The walls were painted blue. Blue for boy. I had picked the color out myself. My parents had built the house when I was a little kid. My Mom, who was appropriately named Felicity, had asked me then what colors we should paint the bedrooms. She always had a knack for making me feel like my opinions mattered.
“My room should be blue,” I had told her. I was six at the time.
“Why?” she had asked with a twinkle in her green eyes.
“Because I’m a boy. Blue is for boys.”
“What color should my and your Daddy’s bedroom be?”
I had considered the question with the somber intensity only a child was capable of.
“Green,” I had finally concluded. “Because Daddy’s a farmer who grows green stuff. Plus, your eyes are green.”
“And what about the guest bedroom?”
“Yellow,” I had answered immediately.
“Yellow? Why yellow?”
“Because yellow’s yucky,” I had said firmly. “The color’ll make em leave. If someone comes to visit, we don’t want em to stay long. Daddy says fish and visitors stink after three days.”
Mom’s eyes had sparkled with amusement. “I think your Daddy stole that expression from Benjamin Franklin.”
“Who’s that? One of our relatives?”
Mom had thrown back her head and laughed for reasons I hadn’t understood at the time. Then she had hugged me hard and kissed me on the cheek. I had wiped away the kiss, pretending to not like it or the hug. I was a big boy. I was six and three-quarters years-old, after all. I projected an air of being far to dignified to enjoy being hugged by his mother. The truth of the matter was I liked her hugs and kisses. Mom always smelled of the pies and cakes she baked fresh for me and Dad almost every day, with a slight undertone of the floral perfume she favored. Being hugged by her was like coming home after a long trip.
Even later, when her metastasized brain cancer had eaten away her insides and she smelled of decay and death instead of cakes and pies, her hug was still like coming home.
I shook my head, still confused by the fact I had awaken in a house I hadn’t been inside of since Dad had sold it. He sold it after Mom died to cut costs and help pay down some of the crushing medical debt he’d been in thanks to Mom’s illness. The two of us had then moved into a cheap mobile home Dad had plopped in the middle of one of his fields.
I got out of bed. I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling I had somewhere to be. The fog clogging my mind began to clear as I looked around the room. No, wait. None of what I had thought seconds before had happened. Dad had never sold this house. This didn’t used to be my room. It was my room. It was as familiar to me as the inside of my mouth.
Two cheap bookcases that sagged full of books, mostly science fiction and fantasy, were against two of the bedroom’s walls. Ever since I had been a little kid, I had loved and admired Heroes. As a result, Hero action figures were on top of my dresser and desk.
“Those are dolls, not action figures,” Mom had sometimes teasingly said to me as I got older.
“Since you often confuse Star Trek and Star Wars,” I had always responded with mock dignity, “I’m not sure what you think counts.”
In addition to the very manly and not at all doll-like action figures, there were models of various Star Trek starships on my dresser. To the left was the Enterprise from the original television show. To the right was the Enterprise from The Next Generation. In the center was the USS Defiant, the starship from my second favorite of all the Star Trek shows, Deep Space Nine. My favorite show was Enterprise, but I didn’t go around advertising that fact. Many Star Trek fans saw Enterprise as a monstrosity, and weren’t shy about mocking and shaming you if you felt otherwise. Star Trek was about tolerance and diversity. The irony of fans being intolerant of others’ opinions seemed to be lost on them.
Despite the fact the room was mostly as familiar to me as the back of my hand, as I looked around, in subtle little ways it was bizarrely as alien to me as the surface of Mars.
The dresser, for example, wasn’t where it should be. It was in the center of the wall across from me. It should have been all the way on the right, covering a hole in the wall. I had busted a hole in that wall by throwing my bookbag with all my might against it when I had come home from middle school one day.
My parents had scrimped and saved to enroll me in Saint Theresa, a private Catholic school, because they had thought—correctly, as I later realized—that the local public schools had sucked. I, a nerdy farmer’s son, had stood out like a sore thumb among the other kids, most of whom were from rich families. A lot of the kids had been too busy looking down their noses at me to speak to me. When they did speak to me, it usually was to make fun of me.
Four older kids had picked on me all week the week I had punched a hole in my wall. They had said I was a nerd loser and had mercilessly made fun of my clothes, my haircut, how I spoke, and everything else about me. Well, the fact I was a nerd was certainly true. But, being a nerd and being accusingly called a nerd were two different matters. After taking the name-calling for as long as I could stand, I had finally snapped. I was not only sick of being teased by those four kids, but by the kids in my school in general.
I had defended myself against the four by telling off their ringleader. I knew he was failing English and that his parents were divorcing. I had verbally stabbed at his soft underbelly.
“It’s better to be a nerd than be someone who can’t even spell nerd,” I had said. “I’d tell you to ask your mom how to spell it, but I hear her mouth is too full of her boss’ dick to educate you.”
The results were predictable. I was precocious, and often wrote checks to bullies with my mouth the rest of my scrawny body couldn’t cash. I knew more about warp drives than I did about fighting. The four kids had all jumped on me and beaten me like I was a piñata they were trying to punch and kick candy out of. When I had gotten home, I’d thrown my bookbag against the wall in anger and frustration, causing a hole.
But now, the hole in the wall was gone. It was as if that incident with the four kids had never happened.
That was not the only thing that was not quite right about my room. A laptop was on my desk. Until I had become Amazing Man’s Apprentice, I never had a laptop or any other computer. I hadn’t been able to afford one. Every time I needed to use a computer, I used one at my school or at the public librar
y.
Another thing that wasn’t right about my room was that it seemed smaller than it should be. It was as if it was a wet wool sweater someone had foolishly put in the dryer. It was still recognizable as my sweater, just shrunk down in size.
A third thing that wasn’t right about the room was, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a gray-white fog that was about the size and shape of a large door. Every time I turned to look at it directly, though, it disappeared. Then it would reappear seconds later, again in the corner of my eye.
Either I hadn’t fully awakened, my room was haunted, or I was going crazy. My vote was definitely in favor of the former.
A fourth thing that wasn’t right was there was a poster of the Hero Avatar to the right of Amazing Man’s. I didn’t remember having a poster of Avatar in this room. And yet, here Avatar was, seemingly life-like, looking right at me in a heroic pose. Then again, Avatar probably looked heroic when he went to the bathroom. He was a big, muscular man dressed in red gloves, red boots, and a gray, one-piece, skin-tight outfit. A bright red stylized “A” was on the center of his chest, and his red cape billowed out behind him. His matinee idol face was chalk-white, giving Avatar an otherworldly appearance.
It was said that the only thing that matched Avatar’s Metahuman power level and good looks was how moral he was. It was a real loss to the planet when someone had figured out a way to kill him. The fact that someone like Avatar and someone like me were both Omega-level Metas must have been God’s idea of a really funny joke.
Wait a minute. What the heck was wrong with me? I wasn’t a Metahuman, Omega-level or otherwise. The only thing Avatar and I had in common was we were both male. We were similar in the same way a sardine and a shark were similar—both fish, but otherwise, nothing alike.
And Avatar most definitely wasn’t dead. I had seen him on television just two nights before, when he prevented the crash of a 747 whose engines had failed. Avatar had flown under the out of control airplane and had carried it gently to the ground, saving everyone on board.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 42
