The First Superhero Books 0-3 Box Set Page 16
That place was Ebon, Indiana. Home.
I SCANNED THE AREA around my home outside of Ebon. There was no sign of any government agents or surveillance. Relief washed through me. They hadn’t figured out my identity. Any DNA samples they’d taken from me en route from the Moon to Earth had been destroyed in the crash, which meant when it came to figuring out who Tempest was, they were still at square one. At least, that’s what I told myself. They surely had pictures of my face, and those images had to have been transmitted back to NASA. Still, there was no one around my home, so I was safe for now.
I flew down softly and slowly to the back door of our two-story house. I twisted the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. I ran around to the front door and tried opening it, but it was locked as well.
I sighed as I knocked on the door. This would be the one time my parents wouldn’t be mad at me for returning home in the middle of the night.
I heard movement on the other side of the door. My heart beat faster and faster. Even though to me it seemed like no time had passed, I felt a longing for my parents hit me like a punch from Richter. The last time I’d seen them had been before my big battle, and I wanted nothing more than to see them again. I could only imagine how they felt after not seeing me for—I realized I didn’t even know how long I’d been gone. What if I’d been gone for a long time? Like, years? How much would my parents have changed? What if they’d forgotten about me?
Anxiety replaced my longing. I cursed under my breath at Dad for taking so long to answer the door.
The knob twisted, and the door opened.
My heart skipped a beat. Heat rushed to my head. I thought I was about to pass out.
“You’re not my dad.”
Homecoming
I looked into the eyes of the old man standing at the door of my home.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked in a tired tone. The wisps of grey hair on his head were frizzy and disheveled. He stared at me with angry, tired eyes.
“Who the hell are you? Where’s Andy Andrews?” I asked, my throat drying. I felt dizzy and sick. I looked around behind the old man, searching for any sign of my parents. From what I could see, the walls had been repainted a cream color, not the maroon I was used to.
“Andy hasn’t lived here for months,” the man said. He was becoming more and more lucid, which meant he was more and more angry and perturbed. “I don’t know who you think you are, or who you think I am, but you’d best get out of here before I call the cops.”
I was bewildered. At a loss for words, I began to back up.
“Hey, wait a second. What’s that you got on?” the old man asked.
I looked down. Even though it was tattered, torn, and faded, you could clearly tell it was my Tempest outfit. I didn’t know what to do.
The gears began to turn in the man’s head as he began to put the pieces together.
“This isn’t—I’m not—” I began.
“Frank? Who is it, Frank?” I heard the voice of an elderly woman say in the background. I looked behind Frank and saw a short old woman peering around the corner at the end of the foyer. Her hair was pinned up and she was wearing a pink silk nightgown that she clutched in fear.
Her eyes went wide when she saw me standing there. I could hear her heartbeat skip and then speed up. I could see her knuckles whiten as she gripped her nightgown with all her might, even from where I was standing outside the front door.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” I said.
Frank looked me up and down. “I saw you in pictures when we toured the place. You’re Andy’s kid. You’re Temp—”
The old man’s eyes lit up, and he stumbled. I ran to his side and caught him before he could hit the ground, and brought him down gently.
“What are you doing?” the old lady screamed. “What are you doing to my hu—”
The same thing happened to her, and I ran across the room, catching her too.
“What’s going on?” I said. The old man and woman were lying on the ground, their eyes glowing, breathing heavily.
The light in both their eyes faded, and the glowing stopped. Their eyes closed, and I could hear them breathing softly.
“Uh, hello? Can you hear me?” a familiar female voice said in my head.
Samantha? I thought.
“I’m gonna assume you’re trying to think what you’re saying. Yeah, you’re going to have to talk out loud. I can’t read your mind. I can just see, smell, feel, and hear everything you can.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on with this couple?” I asked frantically. “Something’s wrong, I don’t know what to do.”
“Just relax. I’m wiping the last few minutes of their memories. Let me tell you, that’s really hard to do. My head is pounding, so I’ll be leaving your mind now. Just get to the Los Angeles Self Storage by the UCLA campus. I’m in storage unit 306. I’ll try to explain what I can when you get here.”
I nodded my head. Then I realized that she probably couldn’t catch that. “Oh. I just nodded my head.”
“Yeah, I got that. See-smell-feel-hear.”
“Right. That makes things easier.”
I stood and picked up the old lady and returned her to her bed.
Samantha popped back into my head as I was picking up Frank. “Oh, and bring some aspirin. This headache is a killer.”
I LANDED IN FRONT OF Los Angeles Self Storage at 3:23 in the morning. The building was a three-story-tall, climate controlled self-storage building. The street in front of it was devoid of people and cars, which worried me. There weren’t even any cars parked out on the street. It seemed to me that people weren’t ready to move back into big cities yet, despite the Richter problem having been taken care of. Maybe not enough time had passed? When I thought about it, I realized that I still didn’t know how long I’d been gone. I had no idea how much time had passed, and that worried me.
I gripped the bottle of aspirin tighter in my hand and pulled the headpiece of my Tempest outfit over my face. I began walking to the front door of the building. When I reached the front door, I realized that I didn’t have a key to get it. I didn’t want to have to break in, but just as I was figuring out what the best and least damaging way to do so would be, the lock in the door clicked. I pulled on the door, and it opened.
“Sorry. Forgot to mention the door would be locked. Come on up,” Samantha said in my head.
I tried to shake the uneasy feeling that crept into the back of my head. I had no idea what I was walking into. I knew that I shouldn’t be rushing into things, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I had no idea what was going on in the world, and Samantha had answers. At least she said she did. She’d said that even before I took out Richter, so I could only imagine what she’d learned in my absence.
Truth was, I didn’t have much of a choice. Samantha had helped me take out Richter. I wouldn’t have figured out how to do that on my own, and even if I had, it probably would’ve been too late. I owed her one, so I forced myself to enter the storage building and walk up the stairs to the third floor.
“What room is it again?” I whispered once I reached the correct floor. I looked down the row of storage unit in front of me, searching for any sign of Samantha.
A large garage door rattled down the hallway ahead of me, and the smiling face of a young lady with blonde hair pulled up into a ponytail poked out from the storage unit. “This one!” she said.
I instantly recognized the voice as Samantha’s. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw her. She didn’t look crazy or anything. Although she did seem to be living in a storage unit. She smiled at me as I walked down the hallway toward the unit. Her bright blue eyes sparkled behind her thick black-framed glasses.
“You must be Samantha,” I said when I reached her, sticking my hand out.
She ignored my hand. Instead, she jumped toward me and gave me a hug. I was taken aback, unsure how to respond.
“Thank you,” she said. Then she pulled back and looked me up
and down. “Wow. I can’t believe it’s really you! Thank you so much for what you did. Taking out Richter...I know it wasn’t easy, but if you hadn’t done something, who knows where we’d all be today.”
I smiled, and a warm feeling rose within me. I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t had any time to process anything yet, and it was just now beginning to hit me what I’d done.
I really had defeated Richter. I really had saved billions of people. I was having a hard time processing it, and I had the feeling that it wouldn’t get easier to do so for a while.
The weight of everything started to hit me. Dizziness washed over me, and I almost fell over. I took a step to try to stabilize myself.
“Are you okay?” Samantha asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I took a deep breath. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m good. It’s just... a lot has happened lately.”
“That’s definitely an understatement.” She turned back into her storage unit. “Come on,” she said, gesturing for me to follow. “There’s a seat waiting for you in here.”
Q&A
I shut the door behind me with a loud bang. When I turned around, the smell of air freshener hit me in all of its fake-flowery glory.
“Sup? I’m Doug,” I heard someone say.
I looked behind a desk and saw a kid who looked to be no older than fourteen sitting there. He had extremely curly hair, and was wearing an oversized sweatshirt that had a couple of stains on it. I was taken aback; I hadn’t been expecting company. “Oh, hi. I didn’t know you were in here,” I said, looking to Samantha for an explanation.
“This is my little brother, Doug,” Samantha said as she cleared some dirty clothes off a large recliner. Once it was clean, she stood gesturing toward it like she was a car salesperson showing off her latest import. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” I said as I sat down. As soon as I hit the chair, I was overcome with drowsiness. The chair conformed to every part of my body, wrapping me in comfort. I sank into it, welcoming the warmth it provided. “Oh, wow,” I said as I closed my eyes and took it in. “I didn’t realize how tired I was.”
“Should we leave the two of you alone?” Samantha asked from behind her own desk next to Doug’s.
I smiled. “No, I’m good.” I sat up in the chair and wiped the drowsiness from my eyes.
“Did you bring that aspirin?” Samantha asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. I’d forgotten it was in my hand. The side of the chair was pushed up against the front of her desk, so I leaned over and placed the bottle down next to her keyboard.
“Thanks,” she said as she popped the bottle open and poured a couple of aspirin into her hand.
I looked around the storage unit. It was actually pretty cozy in here. There were some battery-powered lamps lighting up the room, and some small fans keeping the air circulating. Doug’s and Samantha’s desks were in the left and right corners respectively, facing the door of the unit. There was a small gap between them so you could squeeze by and get behind their desks.
In front of the desks, besides the chair I was sitting in, were two cots with pillows and sleeping bags on top, some boxes filled with belongings, and a small battery-powered generator.
“This is some setup you got here,” I said.
“Thanks,” Doug said as he typed away on his laptop.
“This is just our ‘office,’ I guess you could call it,” Samantha said after she took a swig of her water. “We’re 99% sure we can’t be tracked, but just in case, we have this setup. We have our own apartment, too, of course.”
“Oh, good. It looked like you guys might be living here,” I said as I looked back at the cots and belongings.
“No, no,” Samantha said with an almost embarrassed laugh. “Sometimes we have to pull all-nighters, though, so we just leave those set up.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “Speaking of which, what exactly do you do? I’m guessing you have powers?”
Samantha and Doug looked at each other for an uncomfortable moment. Then Samantha turned to me. “Well, yeah, but we were actually wondering if you could maybe take your mask off? I know you want to keep your identity a secret and everything, but if we’re going to just start telling you all about our powers and such, we’d kinda like to know who we’re talking to.”
I thought about it for a moment. That request was fair enough. If they were about to launch into a big spiel about what all they could do, they deserved to know who they were telling their biggest secrets to. I felt as if I could trust them enough to reveal my identity to them.
I slipped off my headpiece, and it hung behind me like a hood. “My name is Kane Andrews,” I said, reaching my hand over Samantha’s desk.
She smiled as she shook my hand. “Samantha Trask.”
Doug got up from his desk and leaned over just enough to reach my hand. I reached out for him, and we shook. “Douglas Aiden Trask,” he said with a goofy smile.
“Nice to meet you, Douglas.”
“It’s Doug.”
“Of course,” I said, raising my hands to concede. I sat back in my chair. “Now, what exactly do you do?”
Samantha took a quick sip of water and cleared her throat. “Well, as you’ve experienced, I can project myself into other people’s bodies.” She stopped, and made an adorable scrunched-up face. “Well, kinda. It’s a lot less creepy than it sounds. Basically I can see, hear, smell, and feel anything someone else is feeling. And I can project my thoughts into their brain. Well, I can do all those things to most people. I’m still trying to get the hang of it. It’s a lot easier for me to do to people I know well or see a lot. Still, it can be difficult. It took me a long time to get hold of you. I had been trying ever since I first got my powers.”
“When was that?” I asked. “How long have I been gone?”
“Six months,” Doug said.
“Both how long you’ve been gone, and how long I’ve had my powers. I got them the day after you caught that girl,” Samantha said.
I barely paid attention to what she was saying. Doug’s words haunted me.
Six months.
Six whole months. The fact that six months of my life were just gone made me feel incomplete. How much could I have gotten done in those six months? How much could I have changed in those six months? I felt as if I was far behind, and struggling desperately to catch up. There was so much I’d missed out on, for sure. Of all the times to spend in a comatose state on the Moon, it just had to be the six months that mankind was going through the biggest changes it ever had.
“I’m really good with computers,” Doug blurted out. He seemed to be trying hard not to jump up and down in his seat.
I snapped back to reality. “Really? That’s interesting. That’s your power?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Samantha said. “Well...” She looked up to the ceiling, thinking. “Okay, so it’s not really a superpower—”
“Bullshit!”
“Hey! Watch it,” Samantha scowled.
“It’s definitely a superpower,” Doug said, shooting her a sideways glance. He turned to me, and his face returned to its normal, sweet demeanor. “Just not in the traditional sense.”
“Well, I’m not very good at computers, so regardless, you’re better at it then I am,” I said. An idea popped into my head. “Hey, can you try to find something on the internet for me?”
Doug sighed. “I mean, you don’t have to be a superhero to use Google—”
“You’re not a superhero,” Samantha groaned.
“—but,” Doug said, shooting her another death glare. “I’d be happy to be your personal Siri, just this once.”
“Thank you, Doug,” I said with a smile. He smiled back, knowing that the two of us were getting on Samantha’s nerves, and thoroughly enjoying it. “Can you see if you can find some records or something that’ll tell you where my parents are? Their names are Andy and Zoe Andrews.”
Doug held back a laugh. “Your dad’s name is Andy Andrews?”
Doug waited for me to say more, but when I didn’t, he began typing away.
“So, what’s happened since I’ve been gone?” I asked Samantha.
“Well, you picked the wrong six months to spend sleeping away,” she said, echoing my earlier thoughts. “A few more Supers—which is what we’re being colloquially known as—have shown up. Their powers range from flight to communicating with animals.”
“Really?” I said, taken aback. “That’s an interesting one. How many, exactly?”
“Seven. That we know of, at least. So all in all, there’s nine of us Supers.”
“Ten,” Doug said under his breath.
“Nine. However, the number of free Supers? There’s only five, including you and me. Don’t even,” she said to Doug before he could get his protest out.
“What do you mean free?” I asked. I had a bad feeling about what her answer was going to be.
“Every time a new Super shows up, it’s not long before they disappear. One time it was a very public disappearance. A bunch of people in all black body armor pulled up in a large vehicle when this Super, who could stretch his body like elastic, was showing off his powers to a bunch of his friends. They started shooting these guns that shot out purple lighting, and knocked out the Super. They put him in the back of a van, and drove off.”
“We think the government is behind the disappearance of the other Supers. So by that logic, they have four Supers in custody,” Doug said.
Their words began to sink in. The government wasn’t interested in killing the other Supers like they were Richter and me. Hell, I wasn’t even sure they were interested in killing me anymore. If they were, they would’ve just left me on the Moon.
Shit, just thinking about being on the Moon made my stomach turn. I couldn’t believe I’d spent six months up there. I’d never be able to look at the night sky the same way again.
“They would have had five, if I hadn’t escaped from them,” I said.