by Lyz Russo
Caryn dropped until she was hovering a couple feet off the ground, well out of the crazy guy's reach. "She is not your girlfriend!"
"Oh, for... what do you know, anyway? You just got here!" He waved a hand and the invisible strings holding his prisoners aloft vanished, dropping them all roughly to the ground.
"Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
"I already explained to that... that girl, whatever her name was, why I'm doing this. If you'd gotten to the party a little earlier, you could have heard the whole thing. As for who I am..." He crossed his arms, then raised one hand to tap a finger against his lips thoughtfully. "I suppose, for now, you'd better call me the Trickster."
Caryn's eyes narrowed. "Is this a joke?"
"Of course it is!" he crowed, spinning on his heels to march away from her. "Why wouldn't it be?"
"Hey!" Caryn said, whipping around until she was hovering between him and the civilians. "Where are you going?"
"You're just full of questions, aren't you? See, that's how I know you and I aren't gonna get along. People only ask questions when they want to understand something, and my whole shtick is being incomprehensible."
"Look, I don't want to be your friend. I just want you to let these people go."
"Why?"
"Well... well, because you're scaring them and hurting them. And you're causing a lot of property damage."
The Trickster twisted the heel of his hand into one eye. "Oh god, could you be any more boring? I think I liked your friend better. I know I did."
"Well, she's not here right now, so you have to deal with me."
"Says you," he replied, and Caryn was just about to spit out a comeback when something very, very hard, moving very, very fast struck her in the back. The blow plucked her out of the sky, sending her skidding to a halt in the dirt. The goggles were knocked askew on her face, effectively blinding her, and she could taste blood in the back of her throat. Gasping, she pushed herself up on both hands and fixed the goggles, then she looked around.
The goalposts were slithering toward her from opposite directions, bracketing her in. One of them twisted the arm it had used to strike her.
"Oh, boy..." she gasped as they bore down on her.
THE TRICKSTER STOOD in front of his hostages, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He'd already dismissed the flying girl from his mind. The goalpost twins would keep her busy for a little while, long enough for him to have some fun.
The players and spectators were cowering before him, young and old alike. Not a defiant face in the lot. Bor-ing.
"Light bulb," he said, snapping his fingers.
Six columns of earth erupted from the turf all around the hostages. Each one rose to almost ten feet, and then began stretching and contracting, bending, shaping themselves into giant clay statues of cartoon-ish football players, their jerseys and helmets shaped out of patches of sod. Their jaws jutted out comically below their masks, and their arms hung low to the ground. Once they had finished taking shape, they began to move independently, cracking their clay knuckles, dancing eagerly from foot to foot.
"Let's see how you like getting stepped on!" one of them bellowed, and the hostages began to scream as the clay figures blitzed them.
CARYN TOOK TO the air as one of those metal arms slammed down into the turf where she’d been laying. Another one came at her, and she narrowly avoided it, swooping under and behind the constructs this time.
What could she do about these things? The only advantage she had over the people being held hostage was that she could leave any time she wanted, and that ability, while good for her, did nothing to solve the bigger problem. Maybe she could fly back to the police line and they'd give her a bazooka or something...
Someone screamed – a whole lot of people did, actually – and she wheeled around. She saw the turf constructs stomping toward the people. She saw the Trickster jumping up and down and waving his arms like a lunatic. She saw–
She heard the whistling approach of the arm a split second before it would have hit her. She twisted, probably saving herself from a broken spine, and the spear of metal slashed through her bomber jacket, through her blouse and across the exposed flesh of her back. She cried out and lurched away through the air.
"Leave... me alone," she pleaded, but the goalposts were having none of that. They closed in, not bothering to come at her from different directions now. They pressed together as they approached, eager for the kill.
"I said, leave–"
They hovered over her now, frantically clanging their arms together in anticipation.
"–me–"
Four javelins of yellow metal shot toward her. No time to move, nowhere to go.
"–alone!"
A RUSH OF wind tore the officer's notebook out of her hand, and as she bent over, scrambling for it, Angie turned and looked out past the police line, toward the field. The wind was really whipping and there was a funny taste to the air, like ozone.
A glow of static electricity sprang up all over the line of police, leaping from officer to officer, mildly shocking them as it went. Angie looked at her own hands and saw lines of yellow power stitching at the empty spaces between her fingers. The air itself was being ionized.
"Oh my god," she said, looking back toward the field.
THE CRACK OF thunder was enormous, and there was no intermission between it and the lightning. Both struck at once.
The bolt sliced down out of those low hanging clouds and came directly at the field, heading right for the narrow patch of dirt between the two goalposts. Before it could reach the earth, it split, leaping in opposite directions and shattering the goalposts into so many flying metal shards.
The Trickster threw himself to the ground, deafened by the thunder and the sudden, apocalyptic rise in the wind. He looked up, surprised at the ice cold spatter of rain against his cheeks. And the lightning...
The lightning hadn't dissipated into the ground or the air. It was leaping, in giant arcs, across the field, heading directly for him.
"Aaaahaahhh!!" he cried, and rolled out of the way.
The bolt continued past, as if he had never been the target, and slammed into the back of one of the turf creatures. The construct froze, one foot suspended over Maryvale High's quarterback. The lightning leapt from that one to the next, and from that one to the next, and all the way around the circle until all of them were wrapped in a brightly glowing ring of fire. The people trapped inside that ring were screaming in terror, piling toward the center of the circle, while the constructs were completely frozen in place. And then, with one final orgasmic burst of light, the lightning vanished. The constructs remained frozen for a beat longer and then, as one, they crumbled into their component parts, leaving six hillocks of sod and raw earth.
"Wow," the Trickster breathed as his hostages, his playthings, all turned and sprinted toward the police-occupied bleachers. "Nice trick."
"You think that's cool, wait'll you see the encore."
He turned, and found the girl with the goggles hovering right above his head, her face illuminated by the lightning glowing in her eyes.
CARYN DIDN’T KNOW what was happening. Somehow, she had called the lightning down. She knew this the same way she'd known she could go really, really fast, long before she'd started testing the limits of her powers.
Powers, she thought with a grin. Plural. 'Cause, brother, she could do a whole heck of a lot more than just fly.
The Trickster was gaping up at her. He didn't seem to care too much for the unexpected when he was its victim.
"Why don't you give up before I have to pull out another can of lightning-powered whoop ass?" Caryn was bluffing her heart out, in no way certain she could pull off that trick a second time, but if she could just keep the psycho from figuring that out...
"I've got a better idea," the Trickster said, hopping backwards, then turning and scrambling up one of the hillocks his football effigies had been reduced to. "Why don't you try to guess my favorite Tom
Hanks movie?"
Caryn moved forward. "How about Castaway? Since that's what I'm about to do to you."
"Clever! But no, dahling." He spun suddenly on one foot, twisting like a ballerina. There was a kind of twinkling effect around him, and then he stopped – and there were now six of him, one standing on each hillock.
"I was talking about Catch Me If You Can!" they all said, and then, cackling, they ran in different directions.
Caryn flashed toward the closest one, ignoring the burning line of pain in her back, and grabbed him by the collar of his ragged white t-shirt. He laughed. "Nice try, sweetheart, but maybe next time!" Then, with that same strange twinkling effect, he vanished.
Whirling, she spotted another one, hurdling a smoking stump of yellow-black metal that used to be a goalpost. She shot forward, grabbed this one by the hair and whipped him backward off his feet.
"Oooh, kinky!" he laughed. "But I'm really not into it tonight, snoogums. Got a headache." And then he was gone too.
"Nonono... you are not doing this to me!" she growled. She looked around. Three of the remaining Tricksters were heading for the police lines, but one... one was slipping down the middle, heading toward the far end of the field. There was a fence there that faced Osborn Road, and that was just about the best chance of escape any of these guys had.
Caryn roared across the torn grass toward him, hurt, frustrated, and ready to take every bit of it out on this clown.
She rammed into him hard, but at the moment she struck, he exploded into a man-sized cloud of multicolored confetti. Caryn pulled up before she could ram the fence and looked around at who was left.
The three remaining Tricksters were all surrounded. Two of them were pinned to the ground, but all of them, at that moment, turned and waved at her. And then, in a twinkling, they vanished. All of them.
Caryn curled her hands into claws and roared in frustration. Lightning stitched the sky and thunder cracked overhead.
Police and a few brave reporters were pouring out onto the field, more than half of them turning and heading toward her. She was the news now, not the magic scarecrow, and judging by how the cops had all but pulled their guns on her before, she'd probably end up in jail for that jerk's crimes...
"Ma'am, please come down here for a moment so we can ask you–"
"–get the name of the terrorist–"
"–an interview! Just five minutes–"
"Fly Girl! Can you tell us a little about yourself?"
Caryn blinked and looked around sharply. "What did you call me?"
The reporter who'd spoken, a young, good looking black guy with liquid caramel for eyes cleared his throat and said, "Fly Girl. Isn't that… isn't that your name?"
Caryn looked up, over the reporter's head, past the crowd, and saw Angie standing near the top of the bleachers. Her friend was grinning from ear to ear, and giving her two big thumbs up while she did it.
Caryn smiled back. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I guess it is."
"Do you think you made a difference here tonight, Ma'am? How do you feel about what happened?"
She looked back at the reporter, locked on those gorgeous eyes. Gosh, he was cute...
"It didn't suck," she said, and then she dropped him a wink and rocketed upward into the clouds. She was out of sight in an eyeblink, and by the time the clouds dispersed, Caryn Clay–Fly Girl–was already long gone.
"NOT BAD FOR a night's work," the Trickster said, slipping from shadow to shadow in his room. "I mean... could have gone better, but at least we got the girl out of her shell, you know, and that was the whole point. What do you think, Maximillian?"
The stuffed tabby cat lying across the bedspread just looked at him.
"How dare you!" the Trickster bellowed, snatching a glass spray bottle up from his dresser. "How dare you use such language in my house! Bad Maximillian! Bad!"
He squeezed the trigger, and a fine spray settled over the stuffed animal. He kept squeezing and squeezing until finally the cat began to smoke. Its fake fur and skin began to peel away to reveal the stuffing beneath, and the rank odor of melting polyester filled the bedroom.
"Alas, poor Max. I hardly knew ya." The Trickster set his bottle of hydrochloric acid down and turned to look in the mirror. He opened his mouth and examined his teeth. With a satisfied nod, he pulled the skin away from his eyeballs to look at the red meat around them.
He'd drawn the girl, the avatar, out and made her accept what she was. 'Twas the way 'twas always meant to be. After all, in all those old stories, you could never tell whose side Coyote was on–sometimes he was a help to Thunderbird, sometimes a hindrance, but the two were inextricably connected. Thunderbird could never know himself without Coyote there to teach him.
No, those two were linked, and so were their avatars. Until the end of time. Caryn Clay–avatar of Thunderbird, Fly Girl, whatever she wanted to call herself–had not seen the last of the Trickster.
After all, she wasn't the only one to recently receive a gift from a dead grandmother.
He put his foot up on the dresser and pulled a long black feather, similar to the one Caryn had been wearing in her hair, out of the bottom of his pant leg. The same one Coyote had plucked from Thunderbird's belly all those centuries ago. He set it down on the dresser and looked in the mirror again.
The Trickster was gone. In his place stood dark, slouching Jeremy Conrad.
Turning out the light, Jeremy got in bed, and dreamed about all the nonsensical things he would do to Caryn in the days to come.
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THE ORIGIN OF FLIGHT
by Russ Anderson, Jr.
This story is part of the Single Shots Signature Series.
Edited by Tommy Hancock
Editor in Chief, Pro Se Productions-Tommy Hancock
Director of Corporate Operations-Morgan McKay
Publisher & Pro Se Productions, LLC-Chief Executive Officer-Fuller Bumpers
Cover Art by Jeff Hayes
E-book Design by Russ Anderson
Pro Se Productions, LLC
133 1/2 Broad Street
Batesville, AR, 72501
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