“Hey, you,” she said, giving me a wink. “Glad you could make it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I asked.
“I didn’t want you to feel pressured,” she answered, then took my hand. “And I wanted to see if you’d find out on your own.”
“Don’t be rude, Electra,” said one of her friends, a pale, willowy girl with hair that looked light blue in the firelight. “You should introduce us.”
“Allow me,” said Adam, stepping forward and extending his hand. “Adam Atom.”
The girl smacked his hand away.
“Not you, clown,” she said. “We already know who you are.” She looked pointedly at me, as did her friend - a somewhat stout girl with red hair and freckles.
“Jim,” Electra said, “This is Glacia.” She indicated the blue-haired girl, who raised a cupped hand to her lips and blew on it. Snowflakes seem to fly out from her palm into the air.
I reached out to shake her hand. “How do you do?”
“And this is Sharon,” she said, motioning to the redhead.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Come on,” Electra said, tugging on my hand. “We’ve got a blanket spread out over here.”
*****
The night turned out to be an absolute blast, with fun all the way around. Sharon had brought a trivia game, so we played a few rounds of guys against the girls. Smokey, Adam, and I also got in on a couple of volleyball games. Adam even talked Glacia - who had worn a bathing suit - into going into the water with him at one point. However, something must have gone awry because she came back a few minutes later, having frozen the knee-high water he had been standing in into a block of ice. Thus, for the second time in little more than a week, the student body’s most infamous prankster found himself being laughed at by everyone else.
Adam rejoined us after using his power to split the ice.
Glacia pointedly ignored him. “I’m hungry. Where’s the food?”
“There’s food?” I asked. Other than little snacks like s’mores and chips, I hadn’t seen anything substantive to eat.
“Yeah,” Smokey said. “Newbies like you don’t know the ropes yet, so students returning for their second year have the job of bringing food.”
“Well, where do we get it from?” I asked.
“Just wait,” Adam said. “They’ll bring it to us.”
I was surprised. “They serve us?”
“They serve everybody,” Electra said. “You haven’t been paying attention, but they’ve been rolling it out for the last hour.”
I frowned and glanced around. After a few seconds, I did notice people eating hotdogs and drinking from plastic cups. I also noticed that a number of students were actually running around bringing the food to everyone else.
About ten minutes later, I heard Glacia mutter, “About time.” I looked in the direction that held her attention and saw a couple of guys approaching us.
The first guy was short (maybe five-four), with a cherubic face and curly blond hair. He carried a tray with hotdogs - already in buns - on it. He held the tray out to each of us in turn, and we each took one.
The other guy was slender and my height, with a Beatles haircut and glasses. He carried a drinkholder which held a half-dozen disposable cups with plastic lids (much like those in the Academy cafeteria). The straws were already inserted in the cups, but still had the paper from the manufacturer on the end.
He took the cups out one by one and handed them to each of us in turn. I got mine last, and couldn’t help but notice that - unlike everyone else in our group - it didn’t come with a straw. Rather than raise a fuss about it, I just took the lid off and drank from the cup.
We must have all been pretty hungry, because there was almost no conversation for the next few minutes as everyone finished the impromptu meal. Smokey, Adam, and I then gathered up the cups and took them to a nearby trashcan. When we got back, the girls were folding up the blanket.
“It’s getting late,” Sharon said. “We should probably head in.”
“Yeah,” said Adam, “plus it looks like it might rain. Look at that lightning.”
At that, Electra jerked her head up. “What lightning? I don’t feel any lightning.”
Her choice of words struck me as odd at first, and then I remembered her power. She must also be able to sense certain types of electrical discharges.
Adam pointed up into the sky. “Right there.”
There was a flash of light that looked like electricity.
“That doesn’t feel like lightning…” Electra said, her voice trailing off.
I telescoped my vision - and felt a mild sense of panic when I saw what was heading towards us. Or rather who: Magnavolt. And he was moving fast.
“Oh boy,” I said. At the same time, Electra’s mouth dropped open as she obviously sensed who it was as well. “We gotta move!”
“Incoming!!!” I shouted to no one in particular and pointed up. All heads swiveled in the direction indicated as a voice suddenly boomed out from overhead as if shouted from a bullhorn.
“WHAT ARE YOU KIDS DOING OUT PAST CURFEW???!!!”
The entire area erupted into chaos as everyone suddenly went scrambling towards the woods, trying to get away. Speedsters zipped through the trees at high speed; several flyers took to the air and zoomed away. One kid stepped into the underbrush and turned into a tree; a girl leaped into the air and shifted into a hawk. In short, teen supers were turning on everything they had, trying to keep from getting busted.
My little group wasn’t immune. Aside from Electra - who only stayed put because I’d grabbed her arm - the others who had been with us scattered to the four winds like everyone else, making it impossible for me to teleport all of us. Still, if I could keep them out of trouble, I would. I teleported myself and Electra just inside the tree line - hopefully out of view of the Academy’s principal but somewhat in the path of people racing back to the dorms.
On his part, Magnavolt simply floated there, calling out names.
“I SEE YOU, VANITY! BARRAGE - BE IN MY OFFICE FIRST THING MONDAY MORNING! YOU TOO, SCARAB…”
It was almost comical. In fact, when I telescoped my vision and looked at Magnavolt’s face, he was actually grinning.
As I switched back to normal vision, I peripherally saw Electra reach out and grab someone trying to run past us. It was Glacia.
“Did you see any of the others?” I asked.
“No,” she said, slightly out of breath, “but I think they were all ahead of me.”
I looked at her skeptically. “Sharon was ahead of you?”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover!” she retorted. “That chick is light on her feet!”
I groaned in response. We waited a few more minutes, but when we didn’t see any more of our friends I teleported us back to the main building – into one of the underutilized stairwells Adam had shown me.
“Okay, we gotta go,” Glacia said and started to exit the stairwell.
Electra gave me a quick smooch on the lips. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Won’t you get in trouble if the faculty or staff see you? Do I need to get you guys to your rooms?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We won’t get caught. We’ve been sneaking out for a long time.” Then she ran to catch up with her friend.
I stood there for a moment thinking about the last thing she’d said, and wondering if I should be thankful or bothered by it. Putting it out of my mind, I teleported back to my room, took a quick shower, and hit the sack.
Chapter 20
I woke up the next morning drenched in sweat. My sleep had been wracked by horrific nightmares, and I had awakened screaming more than once. The worst part was that I really couldn’t remember the dreams themselves – just random images, sounds, and sensations: lakes of blood, bloodcurdling screams, mounds of bodies…
I stood up - and almost swooned as the room bega
n spinning. I massaged my temples and waited for the feeling to pass, then staggered into the bathroom. I took a towel and wiped the sweat from my face. Looking in the mirror, I saw dark circles under my eyes. Moreover, my skin looked pale and my cheeks pinched. In short, I looked like death warmed over.
But as bad as I looked, I felt even worse. My mouth felt like it was full of cotton, my stomach was doing somersaults, and my hands shook with painful spasms. Out of nowhere, I began experiencing agonizing constrictions in my chest. I started wheezing loudly as it suddenly felt like I couldn’t get enough - or any - air in my lungs.
My training took over. I took a deep breath (or as deep a breath as I could) and held it. I focused, trying to clamp down on my body’s autonomic systems and take conscious control. Slowly and deliberately, I stopped the chest constrictions, relaxing the muscles around my lungs so that they stopped trying to squeeze all of the air out of my body. Turning my attention to my stomach, I tried getting it to settle down by balancing stomach acids, altering the rate of digestion, and more. After becoming convinced that the contents of my belly were going to stay there, I concentrated on my hands, normalizing the nerves so that the tremors would cease.
When I finished, I was sweating profusely again. I turned on the faucet, splashed some water on my face and then swished some around in my mouth. I wiped my face again with a towel.
This was new territory for me. Outside of what occasionally happened when I delved into mindreading, I really couldn’t recall ever being sick a day in my life - presumably the result of exceptionally hardy genes from either my alien grandmother or my extra-dimensional father. I had generally thought I was immune to communicable diseases but obviously I was mistaken. Something, maybe a pathogen inherent to this particular dimension, was clearly affecting me. I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, trying to think.
“You look terrible,” said a voice that was oddly familiar. I opened my eyes. My reflection in the mirror was staring at me, shaking his head in disapproval. “This is what comes of hanging out all night and not getting enough sleep.”
“What?” I asked, stunned.
“You heard me,” my reflection replied. “You had no business out there cavorting at the lake at all hours! It was past curfew anyway!”
“This can’t be real,” I said incredulously. This had to be a joke, some other prankster like Adam using an unknown ability to yank my chain. Or else I was going crazy.
“Oh no, it’s real alright,” the reflection said. “But it is a little crazy. Hmmm…I wonder how Electra feels about dating a guy who has conversations with his reflection.”
Suddenly I was angry. “You leave her out of this!”
“And if I don’t?”
Rather than reply, I screamed and flew at him, phasing in an attempt to imitate Alice and go through the looking glass and into the world of my reflection.
There were flashes of color and sound as I went through the mirror and my head swam for a few seconds. When the feeling passed, I was sitting on a park bench under the shade of a tree near a large pond. Dozens of ducks and geese swam on the water, honking and quacking loudly in a great cacophony of sound.
Something brushed against my ankle, swift and agile. I looked down, and saw that my foot was actually bare. In fact, I wasn’t wearing anything except a pair of boxers. Something small, brown, and furry - a tiny rodent - twitched in the grass next to my foot.
“Mouse!” I shouted, making the small animal jump. Presumably this was what had brushed against me a second ago. It squeaked and then pressed up against my leg, trembling in fear. That’s when I saw the snake.
It came slithering through the grass, heading towards the mouse. It was light blue in color, reminiscent of a swimming pool, with a single black eye on top of its head and one deadly silver fang centered in the roof of its mouth. I had never seen a serpent like it before. It slid through the grass with the fluidity of water, hissing evilly as it closed in on the mouse.
I reached for it with my hand, intending to grab it and toss it away. However, before I could get too close, it lunged. Its fang sank deep in my forearm, drawing blood. I screamed, both in pain and in anger, and teleported the snake away - where, I didn’t know. The ducks and geese, having gone silent when I yelled, suddenly took off into mad flight in all directions, still honking and quacking loud enough to wake the dead.
My arm started throbbing almost immediately after the snake bit me. I stood up, not sure exactly where I was about to go, then collapsed to the ground. I drifted off into mindless, dreamless slumber.
Chapter 21
I woke up lying flat on my back on a cold, hard surface. I groaned and started to rise, realizing with a bit of a start that my back was actually bare.
It was pitch black, so I switched my vision over to infrared. One look around and I immediately knew where I was: the IV drip, the oxygen tank, and - most of all - the wheeled, adjustable hospital bed all let me know that I was in some type of infirmary. The cold, hard surface I had been sleeping on was actually a tiled floor.
I went over to the wall and turned the lights on, then switched my vision back to normal. At that point, I noticed that there was a dull, monotonous droning noise in the air. I quickly traced it to its source - a heart monitor. Although it was turned on, it wasn’t connected to anything; that being the case, the machine was of the opinion that the patient had flatlined. Hence, the noise (which ceased when I turned the machine off).
I yawned, stretched, scratched my stomach. I was wearing a hospital gown, which someone had forgotten to tie up in the back. Thankfully, though, I still had my boxers on. I was absolutely famished, but other than that I felt a hundred times better than when I had last awakened. I rubbed my eyes and started walking towards a door that I believed was the entrance to the bathroom.
“Can you hear me in there?” said a disembodied voice unexpectedly. I looked around, surprised, but didn’t immediately see the source. “Can you hear me?”
It was when the voice asked the question a second time that I noticed an intercom system on the wall next to the hospital bed.
The better to page you with, my dear…
I walked over and pressed the intercom button. “I can hear you.” My voice sounded hoarse.
“Good, good,” said the voice. “Listen, can you tell me where you are?”
“I’m in a hospital room,” I said. “I don’t know how I got here but…can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Yes, but I need you to answer some questions first. Now, can you tell me your name?”
I thought about simply ignoring the voice - just teleporting out of there. But I didn’t know what had happened, how I had gotten here. Also, I remembered feeling sick in my room, and I’d had perfect health up to that point. In short, I needed answers. I needed to play ball.
“Your name, please?” the voice asked again.
“Jim,” I said. “Jim Carrow.”
*****
I spent approximately ten minutes answering basic questions - my age, where I go to school, who’s the current president, and so on - until the person on the other end of the intercom achieved some level of comfort from my answers. Shortly thereafter, a medical team entered the room and I began to receive some of the answers I’d been wanting.
I was still at the Academy, and apparently I’d been in the school’s infirmary for three days. I’d been brought in with an earth-scorching fever and completely delirious after someone found me wandering the school grounds in nothing but my boxers.
The docs had tried to get me set up in the hospital room where I’d woken up. However, after they attempted to inject me with something to help the fever, I’d teleported the needle somewhere unknown and then telekinetically flung an orderly against the wall. Everyone had then fled the room, deeming me too dangerous to try to help at the moment. Someone had also turned off the lights when they left, presuming that I might hallucinate less if I couldn’t see much of anything. (On the flip side, it was me turnin
g on the lights that let the nurses on duty know I was conscious again.)
Now that I was lucid, the staff of the infirmary were able to safely fuss and fawn over me, and they did so. They took my temperature, tested reflexes, and so on before finally giving me a clean bill of health.
“You seem to be fine,” said the doctor in charge, looking over my chart. He was young - probably late twenties, with “Manish Prasad, MD” on his name tag. “There were a few anomalies in your blood and physiology, but as best as we can tell, you are back to normal.”
“Anomalies?” I muttered, eyes going wide. Outside of BT, almost no one had been privy to any type of medical diagnosis concerning me. I didn’t need people knowing that I was part alien, because I had no intention of ending up spending the rest of my days as a government lab rat.
Dr. Prasad must have noted the look of concern on my face.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Supers tend to have metabolisms and physiologies far different from normal people. A few anomalies are expected.”
My relief was probably tangible, but I don’t think he noticed.
“Your recovery, though, is good news in more ways than one,” he said, continuing.
“How’s that?”
“Well, we’ve had a number of other cases since you came in - none as severe as yours, you understand - but we can probably expect them to safely recover now. After you were brought in, we were on the lookout for an outbreak, so we probably caught it early in those other cases.”
He was about to say something else when we both heard the rhythmic stomping of feet outside the room. Through the door, which was open, I saw four men go by in two-by-two formation, decked out in full riot gear.
“What’s with the SWAT team?” I asked.
Dr. Prasad stepped over and closed the door before responding. “As I said, we didn’t know what we were dealing with, and we really didn’t have any infectious disease experts here, so we brought in help from the outside.”
It took a second for the full ramifications to hit me. “You mean Earth? Our Earth? You brought a Gestapo unit over to help fight an illness?”
The Kid Sensation Series Box Set Page 29
