Chapter 23 – Threat

Alex flew as fast as she could, right to the school. She could see what was almost like a meteor coming in at the school, except it didn’t have a mile-long tail, and it wasn’t coming in from straight up in the sky. It was a guy-sized ball of fire, and the fire only trailed back maybe a hundred fifty feet, and pumpkin-sized blobs of fiery destruction fell off him every once in a while.

Oh, jeez, there was going to be a string of fires all across the town, too! She so had to stop this guy. But how could he be on fire and not be dead as well? And how was she supposed to fight a guy who was covered in fire?

She pushed as hard as she could, but she could see she wasn’t going to get there ahead of him. And she could see what would be his target. Libby, standing by the school boulders, in a bathrobe and a fake Terawatt mask.

Oh, crud, what if Libby was about to do naked photos and say she was Terawatt, too? What a creep!

Now that she was closing in on Fireguy, she could see that he wasn’t really person-shaped. He was only partly human shaped. She recognized that look from her mirror. The guy was stuck in a partly-silvery form, unable to go back to human again. Maybe he’d gone insane from being trapped like that. Maybe Danielle Atron was torturing him and making him do this. She wouldn’t be surprised at anything that witch might pull.

So if the guy was stuck being in shapeshifting mode, then maybe he wasn’t orange. He was silver, and the reddish-orange fire all around him was making him look orange-y. But if he was all silvery all the time, then hurting him was going to be really, really hard.

He was curving downward, making an arc that would end up maybe twenty or thirty feet over Libby. If he was planning on punching her, that was stupid. If he was planning on dumping a giant fireball on her, that was probably not too bad. It wouldn’t work too well if Libby really was Terawatt and she had faster flight than he did, but Alex already knew Terawatt was slower than Fireguy.

Time to find out about those other things Willow said. Alex really hoped this guy wasn’t a lot more maneuverable than she was.

Alex came down from just above him and tried to figure out where she could intercept him. It looked like it was going to be really close to the tennis court, which meant Libby and everybody were in real danger.

While she was flying, she only had about seventy or eighty pounds of telekinesis to use, and she had no idea how much Fireguy had to spare. So she was trying something she’d never done before.

She came down on top of him and hit him with everything she had. All two hundred pounds of her telekinesis. And she let herself drop on top of him, too, so that was another hundred and twenty pounds or so. She just hoped the telekinetic wall she was hammering him with would screen her from being burned to a crisp.

Her telekinesis, plus her body weight, was enough to slam him straight down into the ground. She grabbed herself less than a second before she would have smashed into the ground, too, which probably would have killed her without her powers.

He hit hard, and his flame flattened out like a burning pancake. But as soon as she stopped pressing on him and used her telekinesis to keep from crashing into the hard ground, he was bouncing back up.

She charged at him while he was still on the ground, and she went silvery so she could punch him while he was on fire. He threw a fireball the size of a beachball at her, and she just rushed right through it. Since she wasn’t using her telekinesis to fly right then, she could pull this trick. She threw a punch at his jaw and pulled it just before it would have crashed into him. But she hammered him with her full two hundred pounds of telekinesis, right in the face.

But he was silvery, too, so all that happened was his head rolled backward and his silvery form curled backward into a blob. The blob quickly reformed into a partly-human looking shape that was still blazing with bright orange fire. He leapt up into the air, and she followed.

She knew one thing. She couldn’t let him get away. If he got any separation from her, he could fly off at his cruising speed and lose her.

She knew something else: she was probably going to have to stay silvery for the whole fight. He hurled a huge fireball right at her, and she knew she’d be roast Alex if that hit her while she wasn’t silvery.

She swung her arm like she was slapping at a bug, but that was a trick. Really, she was using her telekinesis like a door-sized flyswatter. She slapped the fireball and knocked it straight down into the middle of the tennis court.

Then she flew in closer and punched Fireguy in the stomach. She used all her spare telekinesis, too, and he doubled up over her fist. She jerked her arm back before he could grab it, and she pulled it up so her fist was near her ear.

She brought her arm down and smashed Fireguy in the back of the neck with her elbow, slamming him with all her spare telekinesis, too. He rolled up into a fiery ball.

He jabbed a punch at her. She didn’t see it coming, because it just erupted out of his lumpy form, instead of being a regular punch. She took it right in the stomach because she couldn’t react fast enough. Oof!

If she had been normal, that would’ve really been bad. A full-grown man slugging her in the stomach? That would have been mega-bad. But she was silvery, just like Fireguy, so his fist just sort of slammed into her and sank into her like she was made of jello.

She struck back. She turned and kicked him as he re-formed. She did her best fake karate kick that she could manage while she was silvery and blobby, because it didn’t matter how good a kick it was, as long as it looked good. She was slamming him with her spare telekinesis, too. She caught him in the stomach.

He flew backward about twenty feet, and she instantly closed with him. The one thing she couldn’t do was let him get away from her, because he could take off and she’d never catch up with him.

He threw another big fireball at her, and he just floated there, waiting to see what she’d do. She flew through the fireball and when she came out the other side, she blasted him with a lightning bolt.

Nothing happened. He was silvery and on fire, and the lightning bolt just kind of didn’t do anything to him. She might as well have tried shining a flashlight on him for all the good it did.

So she could get in his way, but she couldn’t stop him. And as soon as he flew away from her, he was probably going to set the whole town on fire. Or at least the whole chemical plant and all the plant warehouses. Just because that was the kind of thing Danielle Atron would want him to do, because nobody was eviler than her.

She knew Terawatt had to find a way to stop him cold.

Oh, wait, that gave her an idea.

First, she had to herd him a bit so he was lower and in a different spot. And she had to make it look totally accidental.

She closed in and punched him in the face, using her telekinesis like a disk in front of her fist so she could really let him have it. His head rocked back, and then he punched back. His fists plowed into her silvery form, hurting her but not damaging her like if she was normal. He hit her four or five times in the body, while she only got one more punch in. And jeez, he could hit really hard.

Still, she managed to tilt things so she was above him and punching down at him, while he was flying upside down and facing her. She closed and threw a punch with all of her telekinesis behind it, slamming him with a disk the size of a shield. Without her telekinesis, she fell towards him, too.

She managed to slam him straight down a good fifty feet, with her silvery form falling on top of him along with her telekinesis shoving him downward. But he managed to push back, and they stopped falling when he was about forty feet above the ground.

He punched her, and she used her telekinesis to pull herself backward, like he had knocked her fifteen feet into the air. That was great. She was ready for step two. She hurled a huge lightning blast his way.

He didn’t even have to move, because it missed him. He turned his head when he heard the explosion behind him as the fire hydrant over by the street was blasted in half. The water jetted straight up maybe thirty feet in a huge fountain.

She used her telekinesis and body-slammed him again, driving him right into the fountain of water. The water didn’t hurt her any, but it put his fire out instantly. She body-slammed him with her telekinesis once more and smashed him into the street.

He spread out in a puddle and pulled himself back together, still undamaged. She flew over to the fire hydrant and landed on the ground so she could use all her telekinesis. Then she pushed a disk of telekinesis at an angle over the fountain of water, and deflected the water so it went sideways right into his face.

He went back down, and she pressed so the water deflected lower, smashing into his silvery form so he kept getting knocked around and he couldn’t pull himself back into a human-looking form.

Police cars and a fire truck came roaring up from both ends of the street, and police started surrounding the battle with guns drawn. More policemen began rounding up the photographers and Libby’s posse.

Alex kept the pounding water on Fireguy until he wasn’t moving anymore. Once she was pretty sure Fireguy wasn’t faking, she let up with the water and flew over to check on him. He just lay there, looking silvery and not pulling himself into human shape, gasping something. She moved closer, her telekinesis up in a shield in case he was trying something tricky.

Really-Wet-And-Not-Fiery-Anymore-Guy looked up at her and gasped, “Antid–… An…ti…dote …”

She looked at the police and yelled in her best Terawatt voice, “Do we have any GC-161 antidote for him?”

Dave Watt holstered his gun and came running over. He had two metal tubes, one in each hand. He poured one over Fireguy, and as the guy turned from all-silvery to partly normal, Dave poured the other tube into Fireguy’s mouth.

The guy gasped, “More … Need more … Make it stop …”

Dave ran back and brought a third tube over. He said, “This is all we have until we get back to the station.”

The guy drank the antidote like he was dying of thirst. Then he collapsed back to the asphalt of the street and slowly turned back into a normal guy. No fire. No flying. No turning silvery.

Unfortunately, there was also the whole ‘no clothes’ thing. Alex tried to just look at his head, because he was a hairy, gross guy with gross tattoos and he was extra-naked, which was extra gross.

“Finally … over,” he gasped. “That bitch … wouldn’t give me the antidote … till I did jobs for her … It just never stopped burning … Thanks …”

Dave Watt and another cop cuffed him, draped a police blanket around him, and read him his rights before helping him into the back of a police car. The guy just collapsed back against the seat of the car and said, “Thanks. This is … great.”

 
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