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Chapter 177 – After-PromAndrew realized that the sexy blonde he’d just caught in mid-air was holding two very nasty-looking handguns. What was it with Americans and their guns?
The girl ordered him, “Get us down now. We’re targets up here.”
Uh-oh, he hadn’t thought about that. He looked over to check. The blood-covered girl snapped her head up to look at him with utterly insane eyes. The air rippled at him.
“Dive! Now!” the girl yelled.
He did it. He felt the force of whatever-it-was tear just over his head. It would have knocked him for a loop and maybe killed the girl.
“Right!” she hollered.
He cut to the right as another vicious invisible blast tore through the air and nearly crushed both of them.
He landed just behind a house and set her on her feet. “Ultraman at your service,” he said proudly.
She was monumentally unimpressed. Dang. He was hoping for more than that. He just flew through the sky and caught her while she was falling to her death! Couldn’t he at least get a big smile and a thank you?
She calmly replied, “Action Girl. Do you have any energy weapons or ranged attacks?”
Whoa. Was this what Action Girl really looked like? Because … wow. He managed to focus on what she had said. “Umm, no.”
She scowled. “All right. Can you run or fly fast enough to catch her by surprise?”
He wanted to impress her, but the telekinesis girl was fast, and long-range. Still, he said, “Yeah, I think so.”
She told him, “Then I want you in a flanking maneuver to come up on her six, while I act as a diversion out here.”
He didn’t really know what she meant. And since they were facing a supervillain, that was bad. He admitted, “I didn’t get that. Can you just tell me in English?”
She pursed her lips and maybe sighed a little, too. “Right. I want you to go at your top speed behind these houses, cross the street several blocks down where she can’t see you, and come around behind her. If you can knock her out before she sees you coming, we win. And she’s got a knife that’s still buried in her chest, so if we can knock her out without doing any more damage, she’ll have a shot at surviving this fight. Right now, if she defeats us, she’ll probably die of internal bleeding. You take off, and I’ll distract her as much as I can.”
“Gotcha.” He wanted to stay and talk to her. And look at her, because she was H-O-T-T hot. But she wouldn’t like that. He ran at his top speed down three blocks. He cut to his left and ran another three blocks so he could come up behind the girl. Then he cut back three blocks and flew through the neighborhood yards to come up behind the girl without making a sound.
He saw the blood-covered girl standing there focusing on Action Girl. It looked like she had pretty well pulverized the house Action Girl was hiding behind, but still hadn’t taken her down. Action Girl fired once more, and he used that distraction to fly right at the girl.
He got within about forty feet of the girl when he hit an invisible wall of force that was like getting hit by a baseball bat. When you were the size of a baseball. It slammed into him and sent him flying.
* * *
Hanna watched Ultraman get smacked over a few houses and out of sight. That was not good.
Psychic powers. She was dealing with a girl who had more than just TK. She probably had a whole package of psychic powers. It would be like dealing with an adult Pyre. Massive offensive and defensive capabilities, along with telepathy or something similar to detect when someone was sneaking up on her.
In that case, Hanna needed to change plans. And she needed to change locations, too, because there was not a lot left of this base of operations.
She sprinted to her right, dived over a high fence, and took up position behind the next house on the block.
She only had five more bullets. A tac vest with a decent number of spare magazines plus other weaponry would have been really convenient. She also doubted that Jo was still conscious, since she hadn’t heard from Stepmom for maybe half a minute. She needed to fight a defensive battle until either the girl passed out from the knife wound or Terawatt arrived.
“Daughter to Stepmom. Daughter to Stepmom. Can you read me?” Nothing. She tried a few more times before she tried, “Daughter to Dad. Do you read?”
“Dad to Daughter. I read you. Invisible Friend is down. The Family Friend is inbound.”
“Daughter here. Good. Stepmom may have lost comms or may be unconscious. I am down to five bullets, and I have no more magazines. Battle zone is not safe for anything within Carrie’s range. Assume telepathy, too, so just being screened from sight may not be enough. And see if Grandma can find anything on our helper. Used the codename Ultraman. He’s trying to hide an Outward Bound Counselor t-shirt and he’s wearing hiking boots. He has a slight Canadian accent. Six-foot to six-two, muscular but not weightlifter build, blue eyes, brown hair, makeshift mask to hide his identity.”
“Grandma to Daughter. Good work. Ooh! I bet I know who that is! Hang on …”
“Daughter here. I am not exactly in a position to hang on.”
Carrie looked her way and sent another pulse of TK her way. Hanna ducked back behind the building, and the force of the blast blew out the corner of the house where she had been standing. If she hadn’t kept moving to the far side of the house, the splinters would have shredded her.
She was really glad Charlie had loaned her his dad’s Horatio Hornblower novels, so she knew just how nasty splinter wounds could be.
Yeah, telepathy. Carrie knew exactly where she was, even if she was now behind a large rose trellis and wasn’t visible from where Carrie was.
But Carrie was moving forward now. She walked across her yard and toward Hanna’s position.
It was really hard to tell just how much Carrie was bleeding. She was coated in pig blood, but there was a lot more blood around and below the knife than elsewhere. And there might also be some extra blood coming from the corner of Carrie’s mouth. Hanna wasn’t surprised. That knife had to be buried in one lung, and it had to be dangerously close to Carrie’s heart.
Hanna tried, “Carrie! Carrie White! I am Action Girl, a deputized superheroine with the Department of Homeland Security! Do not attempt to remove that knife, as it may be plugging a serious arterial wound and removing it might kill you!”
Carrie glared her way, and Hanna dodged. The rose trellis exploded and the wood siding went flying her way as another TK blast damaged the house.
Acid Burn came back on. “Grandma to house. Your Ultraman is Andrew Clements, resident of Briarwood, which is a suburb of Toronto. The Toronto op came up with three possible powers: superspeed, flight, and superstrength. Does he have some of the three?”
“Daughter. Roger that. He has all three powers. This is that op that Captain Miller and Sergeant Carlson were on?”
“Grandpa to Daughter. Yep. He’s a sixteen-year-old boy. So Granny, where did he get his superpowers? A really good box of Crackerjacks?”
“Grandma here. Searching for commonalities with our list we built up for the Toronto op … Got it! Get this, Andrew Clements and younger sister and divorced mom live next door to … Professor Benjamin McGrath Jeffcoate, Ph.D. in biophysics, who left the University of Toronto when he was refused tenure because … lemme see … Ooh, this says disagreements with tenured physics faculty over ‘appropriate directions for future research’. If he gave this kid superpowers, that could be a pretty big reason why.”
“Oh, crap,” General Jack cursed. “So is he Maggie Walsh 2: Attack of the Clones, or is he Bill Lee 2: Electric Boogaloo, or he just another Dr. Nigel Phillips?”
Willow complained, “You already did the ‘Electric Boogaloo’ joke. And the ‘Attack of the Clones’ joke.”
“Ooh, tough room, tough room. Fine. Can I go with ‘Phineas and Ferb’s Quantum Boogaloo’?”
Willow cracked up laughing. “How do you know all this stuff?”
Hanna spotted Ultraman flying in a wide circle around Carrie while obviously looking for Hanna’s position. She darted back to the rear of the yard, hopped up on the back fence where Carrie couldn’t see her, and waved until Andrew spotted her. “Daughter to house. Ultraman is on his way back, even though he got blasted pretty hard a few seconds ago.”
“Grandpa to Daughter. You have first contact, since Tera is not on-site yet. Don’t shoot him or break him into pieces or anything.”
“Daughter. Roger that.” She pretended she was sticking her tongue out at him.
Ultraman landed beside her as she leapt off the back fence. “Sorry, but she really hammered me. I needed a few seconds to get up off the ground and get back here. So what are we going to do?”
Then Hanna heard it over her earjack. “Family Friend to house. Family Friend to house. Come in please.”
Hanna broke into a grin. “We are going to help Terawatt save the day. As usual.”
* * *
Alex had gotten a full briefing on her Blackbird tablet before she bailed out. And she was listening to Sergeant Walters and Action Girl as soon as she got in range and her tPhone picked up their comms. She was concerned about Klar, but it was really worrying her that she wasn’t hearing Jo on the comms either. “Family Friend to house. Family Friend to house. Come in please.”
“Dad to Family Friend. Have you been briefed?”
“Family Friend. Yes, on Carrie White and Andrew Clements both.”
“Daughter here. Carrie has been stabbed, probably by her own mother. Before that, she was assaulted and humiliated in front of her entire prom. She is not likely to be stable at this point.”
“Stepmom to Fam Friend. Expect she won’t trust anyone at this point. Be careful.”
Alex checked, “Stepmom, are you okay?”
“Stepmom. No. I think I’ve got bruised ribs and at least one sprained wrist and maybe a mild concussion. I’ve lost my DE and it took me forever to find my earjack in this mess.”
Uh-oh. With sprained wrists, even Jo would have trouble accurately firing a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle.
“Daughter to Stepmom. Stay down. We’ve got this.”
“Stepmom to Daughter. Let me just find my sidearm.”
Wow, Jo sure was determined. Maybe ‘stubborn’. Or maybe the difference only depended on whether you liked what she was doing.
Alex zoomed across the town to the place on Willow’s map. She was sure she’d be able to spot it as soon as she …
Oh, crud. There was a house that looked like a thousand-foot-tall giant had stomped on it. And in the street nearby was a girl just covered in blood. And there was still a big knife sticking out of her chest. This was their supervillain? She looked more like the biggest victim in the whole town.
“Carrie White! Carrie! I! AM! TERAWATT! And I am here to help!”
The girl’s head snapped up in a way that reminded Alex of something like a bird or a lizard, but totally not a human being. And the air rippled.
Alex dodged to the right, and the TK pulse ripped past her. She was so glad she had paid attention to everything people had been telling her for the last twenty minutes, because getting hammered all the way to the Atlantic Ocean would not be tons of fun.
“Carrie! Listen to me!”
Another nasty pulse of TK. Alex dodged to the left this time.
“Carrie! You have telepathy! You should be able to tell I am not here to attack you, but to save as many people as I can, and that means you!”
Carrie looked at her, but didn’t launch another TK blast. She just stared for long seconds. Alex took the opportunity to fly in closer. A little closer.
Carrie’s shoulders sank, and her head dipped forward slightly.
Alex wanted to jump up and down and screech. It worked! It really worked! She never managed to talk people into stuff, and it was really working this time! She floated down toward the ground and closer to Carrie’s position in the middle of the street.
Okay, she knew she was doing something mega-dangerous. The closer she got to Carrie, the less time she would have to react if Carrie decided to launch another attack. And maybe Carrie had other attacks besides the rippling-air TK blast. And the ‘crush you and your whole house’ thing. Terawatt sure had a lot more than two TK attacks, so Carrie might have a bunch. After all, she had made a lightbulb explode, and she had floated books, and both of those had been days ago, so she had to have thought about stuff she could do with her TK.
Alex kept being reassuring. “Okay, Carrie, I know everything’s been totally horrible, but you need to stop, and we need to get you to a doctor, and you need to work with me. I can help. It’s what I do.”
* * *
Chris Hargensen looked down the street from the shotgun seat of her boyfriend Billy’s sports car. She slapped him on the shoulder. “There! In the street!”
Billy floored it. The car shot forward and sped up even faster than she had thought it could go.
Son of a bitch, he was gonna run her over. Chris had been really pissed off about the prom deal, but she didn’t want to kill the little freak.
* * *
Alex reacted as soon as she heard the car engine. She did what she had been doing ever since she had learned not to turn around with your back to your threat. She leapt up into the air sideways, away from the car noise. But that left Carrie standing in the middle of the road closer to the car, with the car speeding up and aiming right for her.
“L–…” Alex was about to yell ‘look out’ and swoop in to pull Carrie out of the way, but Carrie was already reacting.
Oh, right. Telepathy.
Carrie’s head had already snapped to the side so she had a view of the speeding car. And the air rippled.
The car didn’t stop. It bounced backward like it had just gone head-to-head with a speeding semi. The front of the car was crushed like an accordion. Half the windshield disintegrated.
The car bounced, and rolled backward, and ground to a halt almost a block further back. Then Alex saw a streetlight rip loose from the sidewalk and aim for the wreckage. She yelled, “Carrie, no!”
* * *
Andrew spotted the streetlight heading for what was left of the car. He leapt into the air.
The streetlight was moving fast, but he had the angle. He crashed into it, driving it away from the car and into a front-yard flower garden. Man, that really hurt.
He landed in front of the car and lifted what was left of its front end. Then he pushed hard. Parts of the undercarriage gave way with the clatter of metal, and he ran the wreckage four blocks backward so the car was well away from the girl. He didn’t stop until he ran half a block past a paramedic truck that was out of sight on a cross street.
He lifted the car and turned it so he could run it over to the paramedics, who were being smart enough to stay out of Carrie’s sight. He sure didn’t want them to end up like those police cars he’d rescued out of that guy’s living room. Those policemen were alive, but they were battered, and they were all dazed or else still unconscious.
Carrie’s head snapped around in that insane, totally disturbing way she had. She gave Alex a murderous glare. “You tried to trick me!”
Alex insisted, “I didn’t! I —”
The TK pulse seared through the air, threatening to rip her head off.
She flew backward and to the side, giving her more room to maneuver and more time to react. “Carrie, please!”
The next TK pulse came searing her way, and she dodged to the side and up. The pulse slashed under her and ripped a chunk of the roof off a house. Carrie was still tracking her with those crazy eyes and that rigidly twitching head.
“Carrie, don’t make me —”
Another TK pulse blasted right at her. Alex dodged further to the side. And then Carrie’s head snapped abruptly to one of the wrecked houses. Alex was far enough around Carrie’s side that she could get a look at what Carrie was reacting to. And it was Jo, who was lying in the wreckage of a house and trying to line up a shot at Carrie with a big handgun. And Carrie was going to crush Jo!
“NO!” Alex yelled and hurled a lightning bolt at Carrie’s legs. She didn’t want to hurl one at Carrie’s chest for fear it would hit the knife still sticking out of Carrie’s chest and do really horrible internal damage.
But Carrie must have picked up Alex’s intention before Alex hurled her lightning. Most of the width of the street writhed like it was alive, and a twenty-ton strip of asphalt ripped its way loose to turn into a black wall blocking Carrie off from Alex’s lightning bolt. The bolt hit the middle of the asphalt wall and blasted chunks of asphalt all over the place, but Carrie was untouched.
Alex darted off to the side and put herself in between Carrie and Jo.
“Stepmom here. Get the fuck out of the way.”
Alex tried to ignore Jo’s anger. She pleaded, “Carrie, please, I won’t let her shoot at you, just don’t shoot at her. She’s trying to do her job. She’s trying to protect people. I can stop her if you just stop smashing everything in sight!”
The strip of asphalt tore its way loose from the street and turned into a massive sideways ‘V’ that tried to slam Alex in between its immense sides.
Alex darted straight down and went silvery. The asphalt slammed shut and just missed her. She had a split-second of opportunity, and she took it. She hurled a lightning bolt at Carrie’s legs and darted forward.
The entire street buckled under Carrie’s feet, and an area ten feet across shot five feet into the air. The lightning bolt hit the rocky pedestal under Carrie.
Carrie wasn’t faster than lightning, but her telepathy was letting her react before Alex finished thinking about stuff. That was so not good.
Alex jetted around behind Carrie, while the immense mess of asphalt crashed into the street and accidentally created a hill protecting Jo. Carrie snapped her head to the side, trying to hurl another blast of TK at Alex. But Alex didn’t attack. She kept moving, flying around the pedestal so Carrie would have trouble trying to track her.
Alex got a look at Carrie’s face. Oh, crud, that looked really bad. Blood was trickling out of both nostrils, and one side of her mouth, and one eye.
Alex yelled, “Carrie! Stop! You’re killing yourself!”
But Carrie wasn’t listening to her anymore. The next time Alex flew around the pedestal and was in between Carrie and Jo, the entire pile of asphalt leapt right at Alex’s back.
But Alex was silvery, so she could see behind her as well as in front of her. She spotted the movement, and she jetted straight up.
The asphalt crashed to the ground where she had been a split-second earlier, but it was so close to Carrie’s rock pedestal that the pedestal was knocked over. Carrie didn’t make a sound as she tumbled head over heels and ended up in a heap, face-down on the street. The butcher’s knife that had been lodged in her chest was punched so far into her that half the blade was protruding from her back.
Alex gasped in horror and flew over to where Carrie lay unmoving. Alex used her TK and carefully checked for a pulse, and there wasn’t any. No heartbeat, either. No breathing.
Jo and Hanna came running over, both of them with their handguns aimed at Carrie’s body. Alex could tell Jo was limping a tiny bit and refusing to admit she was hurt.
Alex gulped. “We’ve got to get her to an emergency room.” Jo reached down to check Carrie’s throat for a pulse, but Alex told her, “I already checked. No pulse, no heartbeat, no breathing, no nothing.”
Jo pointed at the position of the knife. “There’s nothing we can do. The way that knife’s pointing now, it must’ve sliced right through half her heart and a big chunk of her lungs. Even if we could get her to a major medical center, we couldn’t get her on a heart-lung machine fast enough to save her. Besides, I saw her face. She was probably already killing herself from overuse of her powers.”
Alex clenched her jaws. “It’s not fair. I almost saved her. I almost talked her into stopping.”
Hanna patted her on the shoulder. “It is not your fault that some crazy people chose the worst time in the world to try and run her over.”
Alex muttered miserably, “I was so close. I almost got one person to listen to me, for once.”
Jo gently said, “A lot of people listen to you. More than you realize. And this isn’t your fault.” She sighed. “It probably isn’t her fault either.”
Hanna looked around them and pointed out, “Tera, she did not give you any choice. Look around you. If you had not stopped her, she would have killed us and done this to the entire town.”
Alex grimaced. It looked like they were in the middle of a war zone. The street was destroyed. The yards were ripped up. Almost every house she could see was damaged, and half of them were wrecked beyond repair, and one of them was crushed like it had been in a giant trash compactor.
Jo clicked her earjack. “Stepmom to Dad. Stepmom to Dad. Come in please.”
“Dad here. Situation?”
“Stepmom. Threat down. Permanently. All-State’s gonna have their hands full with this neighborhood, though.”
“Dad still at the school. Fire trucks are on-scene and working away. The gym’s a write-off but they’ve probably saved most of the school, not counting the collapsed section on the west side. We’ve got seven dead, with three of the bodies still in the gym. If you’ve got Carrie White, we’ve got every prom attendee accounted for. Eighteen seriously injured, some smoke inhalation, and a lot of traumatized teens.”
“Grandpa here. We’ve got state police and Maine National Guard on their way already. FEMA has people on their way up there, and so does the state governor’s office. Any rescues left to perform?”
“Stepmom to Grandpa. If the gym is clear, we need to check the houses we’re looking at, and check on a carload of idiots who tried to run down our super just as Tera was getting through to her.”
“Do that. Then move to Dad’s position and get Invisible Friend to Maine Medical Center in Portland. Aunt Jan is briefing them already, and will assist as soon as she can get there.”
“Family Friend to Grandpa. Stepmom is injured. I’ll fly her to Dad, Daughter can sprint there or I’ll come back and get her, and they can all drive Invisible Friend to Portland. I’ll stay and assist with search and rescue.”
Jo really scowled at her. “Stepmom to Grandpa. I’m fine for search and rescue.”
Hanna clicked her earjack, too. “Daughter to Grandpa. Stepmom is limping, and has at least one sprained wrist. Plus injured ribs, based on how she is breathing very carefully. She needs to go with Dad. I will stay and assist Family Friend, then when we are released, she can fly me to the hospital so we can rejoin the team.”
“Grandpa to house. Stepmom, I know you won’t like this, but I’m going with Daughter’s recommendation. Fam Friend will fly you to Dad’s car, you will provide her with a sat phone, and you two will drive I.F. to Portland ASAP. Daughter, begin S & R. F.F., make contact with Ultraman before he leaves. You do not have permission to reveal secret identities this time.”
Jo gritted her teeth unhappily but still said, “Roger that, Grandpa.”
Alex and Hanna both said, “Roger that.”
Alex shrugged and told Jo, “I know you don’t like it, but you need to stop before you get hurt more. And once I pull you into my morph, you won’t have to worry about ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ either.”
Jo glanced down at her cleavage and automatically tugged her dress together more tightly.
* * *
Andrew carefully followed the head paramedic’s instructions. He had already ripped out the remains of the windshield and torn off the roof. Now he was waiting for the paramedics to signal they had tourniquets on what was left of the girl’s legs, so he could pull the front of the car off her.
It was the most horrible thing he’d ever seen. Not that he’d seen a lot of really horrible stuff in his life. Maybe he’d had it pretty easy in his life, because he’d sure gotten smacked in the face with awful injuries and bloodshed and all, ever since he’d sprinted into the town.
The guy in the car was dead. When the front of the car got crushed into the passenger compartment, the guy got a steering wheel punched halfway through his chest. The girl got most of an engine block crushing her legs to a pulp. On top of that, pieces of the windshield had gone flying and sliced half the skin off the girl’s face. It was grisly. He hadn’t puked yet, but it had been close a couple of times. He kept telling himself that Terawatt and Action Girl wouldn’t throw up in the middle of a rescue, so he wouldn’t either.
One of the paramedics mentioned, “Jeez, I’ve never seen a windshield do this.”
He didn’t say anything, but he could figure that one out. One crazed super-powered telekinetic supervillain who was massively angry at people who were trying to run her over with a car.
Action Girl ran up to the car. “How many survivors?”
Right. If there weren’t any survivors, the paramedics wouldn’t be working like crazy to save people.
Action Girl peeked in the back seat, and then ripped the trunk open. He’d have to remember she was really strong. She looked like a Hollywood starlet, especially in that outfit. “Get a police car over here. An investigator, not a patrolman.”
“How come?” asked one of the paramedics, the one who was answering to Bob.
She scowled like she didn’t like for people to question her judgment. “Because we’ve got evidence of some felonies, and they’re directly related to what happened tonight.”
The other paramedic — Howie — called it in, and an unmarked police car was there before they had the girl out of the car and ready for transport.
“Whatcha got here, Howie?” Andrew knew Craig had a bit of a Maine accent, but this guy sounded like a parody of the classic upper Maine sound.
Howie just pointed at Action Girl. She stepped forward and pulled out a badge wallet from under her top. “Department of Homeland Security. You can call me Agent Peterson. It’s not my real name.”
The cop looked at her with a patronizing smirk. “Is that even a real badge? Honey, you don’t look old enough to get a driver’s license, much less an official DHS badge.”
She really didn’t like that. She grabbed a sturdy metal section of the peeled-back roof and bent it in a ‘U’. “My apparent age is why I was selected for this op. Now you can stop being a complete asshole and do your job, or I can have my bosses call the state governor’s office about you. Your call.”
The cop gave her a look. “Well, you’re obnoxious enough to be a Fed. I’ll give you that much.”
She pointed at the car. “You know who the car belongs to, right?”
The cop shrugged. “Looks like Billy Nolan’s hot-rod.”
She said, “Good. Now look in the trunk. One ten-pound maul with pig blood all over it, and the bloodmarks suggest it was used at least twice. One length of rope. Bloodstains where two large buckets full of pig blood were sitting. One machete with pig blood coating it.”
He looked in the trunk. “Ayup, looks like what you claim. But there’s no way to tell it’s pig blood without analysis. You just guessing based on what happened last night?”
She insisted, “No. I also have enhanced senses. I could smell the pig blood before I looked in the trunk. They slaughtered at least two pigs, planted buckets of the blood in the rafters over the stage in the school gym, and arranged to dump the blood on Carrie White when she was crowned prom queen.”
“Carrie White? Prom queen? I can’t see that one. There’s gotta be fifty girls who’d get picked before her.”
She glared at him. “Assume that a lot of students were in on it. At any rate, when the blood was dumped on Carrie White, she went supervillain on the gym. We managed to rescue most of the promgoers and track her down. Terawatt just finished dealing with her, and is searching the damaged houses in the area for injured people.”
“So what’s your point, honeybun?”
Action Girl looked like she wanted to pick the cop up and bounce him off the pavement a couple times. How was this guy not noticing that she was pissed off at him? She insisted, “That makes Billy Nolan and Christine Hargensen guilty of a long string of felonies, including two counts of felony assault, and if the prom king died of his injuries, that becomes felony murder.”
The cop glared at her. “Look honey, I know the law. You don’t need to tell me what murder is.” He glanced at the injured girl’s body as the paramedics loaded it into an ambulance. “Anyway, I figure neither one of ’em is gonna last long enough to get Mirandized, much less arrested or tried.”
Action Girl just snapped at him, “I saw what Carrie White did. I saw what shape Carrie White was in when she was fighting Terawatt. These two morons and whoever helped them are responsible for taking a super-powered girl and turning her into the thing that just wrecked a big chunk of your town. And since there’s a gas station just three blocks up this street, you’re probably lucky Carrie didn’t get that far and turn the rest of the town into a fireball.” She pointed at Andrew and tilted her head for him to follow her.
She sprinted down the street back toward where the fight had been going on. He gasped a little when he saw Carrie’s body and that huge knife. He easily ran alongside Action Girl, since she was only going maybe sixty or seventy kilometres an hour.
There were three other ambulances and paramedic trucks with their lights flashing. Terawatt’s silvery form came flying out of one of the wrecked buildings. She went normal, and he could see she was holding a bleeding child in her arms. A mother was sitting on a gurney getting patched up, and Terawatt smiled as she put the child in the mother’s arms.
Man, that was what a real superhero did. The house looked like a tornado had hit it, and Terawatt had still managed to rescue everyone. He wished he could do that.
Action Girl saw where he was looking, and she nudged him. “Yes. That is what she does. And we should help her. Once we are done doing search and rescue, she wants to talk to you. And don’t worry about your secret identity. We already figured that out, Andrew.”
He winced at that. “What gave it away?”
She smiled slightly. “We picked up internet rumors about a superhero in Toronto, and we sent a small team of investigators there to look around and see what they could find. So when you were demonstrating the same power set, and I heard you have a slight Canadian accent, we guessed. And I could see your Outward Bound shirt, so it was no problem to check their records for counselors.”
Okay, this wasn’t sounding good. He checked, “What do you want?”
Her smile broadened. “We want you to consider joining our group of superheroes. Terawatt is calling it the Justice League.”
He noticed that she had stopped sounding American. In fact, she sounded Scandinavian. Well, she sure looked it. He pointed out, “You do know I’m not even American.”
She shrugged. “I’m European. Tsurara is Japanese. Ayananta is in India. Shaman is currently in central Africa. We’re already international. Terawatt may be American, but she wants superhero groups all over the world, working independently of individual countries. And anyway, you ought to let us get you signed up with the United Nations. Toronto would be really excited to have their own internationally-recognized superhero.”
He winced. “Dr. J. would have a fit. He’s been trying to get me to use my powers less, ever since I … got ’em.”
Action Girl pointed out, “You really should use them more. And we can help you with things like a uniform and disguises and training.”
He looked down at the t-shirt he had swiped, which had dried in a mass of wrinkles all over his Outward Bound shirt. “Uhh, yeah, I could sure use some help with a good uniform.”
She added, “And since you have superspeed, you could put a uniform on and take it off fast enough not to worry about being seen, and we can give you some advice on storing your uniform effectively. Terawatt started out just keeping hers folded in a gym bag under her bed. Not very safe or secure. And I wasn’t even using a uniform or a disguise when Terawatt found me and rescued me.”
So he spent the next five minutes doing search and rescue with Action Girl and Terawatt and the locals. Okay, he and Terawatt dashed from house to house checking that people weren’t trapped in the wreckage, and Action Girl carried every rescued person over to where the paramedics and ambulances and police cars were stationed. They had to be parked down the street from the center of the damage, because there was basically no street left in the middle where Terawatt had battled a supervillain.
Once they were sure they had rescued everyone, Terawatt took him aside. “I could see Action Girl giving you the pitch. You don’t have to say yes or no right now. Just take this.” She gave him a little business card for the SRI. “It’s the DHS Superpowers Research Institute. You can get me through them day or night. We’d like to have you on our team, but I know you’re still a month away from turning seventeen and you have your own responsibilities. Talk it over with your family and Professor Jeffcoate, and do what’s right for you.”
He confessed, “My family doesn’t know. Just Dr. J.”
“How long have you had your powers?” she asked.
Wow, she was so pretty. They all were. He said, “It’ll be three years in August.”
She nodded. “That makes sense. He left the University of Toronto four and a half years ago. Has he ever talked about that?”
Andrew shrugged. “A little bit. He misses some of the ‘colleagues working together and talking over stuff’ part of things, but he doesn’t miss the ‘you are a bad boy for wanting to work in my personal field and make me look lame’ stuff.”
She smiled slightly. “Then give him the phone numbers, too. We have some top-notch physics and biophysics and biochem and computer experts, and they like working with talented people. This could be even better for him than for you. But whichever way you go, make sure your family knows the truth, and make sure they’re safe. Okay?” He nodded. “Any questions you’d like to ask me right now?”
He nodded again. “Does Action Girl have a boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
Rats. “How about you?”
She beamed. “Yes, and I’m very serious about him. But thanks for asking.”
Darn it! He tried one more time. “How about the Hispanic lady in the sexy dress?
She patted him on the shoulder. “Andrew, she’s an Orphan. She’s over twenty-five. You’re not seventeen yet. Why don’t you wait until you’re over eighteen before you go there?”
She swooped through the air, pulled Action Girl into her silvery shape, and took off to the south. He stood there and watched until she was out of sight.
Wait a minute, did that mean that Terawatt was not over twenty-five?
And how was he going to explain this to Martha and Patti back at the kitchen? And Craig? Oh, man …