Somebody, Save Me!

by Steve Beaulieu

  It wasn't long before the waiting racked my nerves. Even if I'd known, down to the second, how long it would take to have an effect, every second felt like a half-hour. Maybe I just didn't know him well enough—maybe I wasn't even picturing the right lumbering lug—I was starting to panic and think "okay, time to come up with a plan M," when Bodie plodded over to Randall. Crossing his thick arms before him, Bodie rumbled, "You know, it should be the strongest should be number one."

  Before Bodie approached, Randall had been using the control rod to, apparently, draw imaginary diagrams at the edge of one of the lighted circles. I didn't know if it was actual planning or just a cargo-cult attempt to imitate planning activity. When Bodie challenged him, however, he pulled himself up and faced him head-on.

  Their voices were too low to hear, but from their body language, Randall was giving Bodie his full attention, and giving his bid for leadership full consideration. Right up until he gave Bodie the full length of the control rod right across his teeth. The harsh impact, and Bodie's bellow of agony, echoed in the confined space of the arena. Archie stood still as a statue, helpless hands upraised. Jared's two buddies, still fixed to their pillars, had been complaining through their gags; they abruptly stopped.

  "A man needs to understand his limitations," Randall said to Bodie, down on the floor doing a lot of wet spitting inside his guidesuit hood. "Your biggest limitation? Is that you're not me. You wanna buck for the top spot in some other crew? More power to you. But when I'm the one giving the orders, don't you ever try to cross me." The metal-encased control rod thrust out to point at the face it had just reshaped; Bodie whimpered and scuttled back out of its range.

  I took a deep breath, trying to convince my stomach it could transform back from ice water any time now. Another mark in the "cons" column: By now, all the safeties were clearly off Randall's inner psycho. If they'd ever been on.

  Randall turned, and Bodie warily got to his feet. He wiped his arm across his covered mouth. "Pug dot," he muttered in disgust and yanked off his hood. "Fuggle. Godda whiz." And despite how recently he'd said he didn't need to, he started trudging over to the corner that had become the de facto latrine. I could almost hear the nature-film narrator's voice: Dejected by the failure of his challenge to the pack leader, the young male seeks release for his frustrations...

  I ducked to put a pillar between me and Bodie and gestured Archie to follow behind Bodie. His body language said, clearly, Who, me? I gestured with an open hand to Randall. Archie decided it might be best to follow quietly after Bodie after all.

  Timing, timing... The distraction of Bodie's injuries logically meant he should be even easier to sneak up on than Archie had been. But for what I planned to work, Archie had to be there, too. I had to match the pace of my sneaking to Archie's, and "agonizingly slow" didn't even start to cover that skulking slink. The delay gave me time to connect two zip ties into the big loop I needed, but every second still felt like an eternity. And my heart hammered, knowing that this was going to be what alerted the most dangerous person in the room to my presence.

  Bodie finished his business, and I knew it was then or never. Archie and I were about five feet behind him on either side, and I think he heard one of us just as he was doing up his fly; his head came up and started to turn in my direction.

  Am I an athletic guy? Not by a long shot. The only exception being my legs, which are damn strong as a result of walking to school and work and everywhere. I ran straight at the wall in front of Bodie, leaped up and planted my feet, and then pushed off as hard as I'd ever launched myself from the loading dock. I cannoned into him and brought him crashing down to the ground.

  I rolled only part-way off him, keeping my weight on his chest to keep him down, and slipped the zip-tie loop I'd made over his wrist. He wouldn't be stunned long. "Quick," I gasped to Archie, "give me your hand!" Archie, also stunned, took a moment to respond, and then reached down. I took the hand he offered, yanked it into the zip-tie loop, and pulled it closed, pinning their two wrists together.

  Archie yelled in dismay. "What the - you damn jerk! Lousy traitor!" Boo-hoo. I didn't care what he thought - only that he and Bodie kept each other busy, and left me with just Randall to deal with.

  Or maybe not. Bodie's free hand slammed into my head, hard enough to jar my teeth. I yelped. Trying to roll off him and onto my feet, I discovered his freakishly large hand had gotten a really solid grip on the top of my skull. I couldn't pull loose, and he was starting to squeeze.

  Bodie's grip was painful, but nothing compared to what Randall might do - and the psycho-lord himself was on his way over. In a panic, I reversed my attempts to pull out of Bodie's hold, and crab-crawled under his and Archie's joined arms, trying to get at an angle where his fingers couldn't keep their purchase. For a crazy second, it felt like I was in a high-stakes combat round of some playground game, like limbo or London Bridge—Oh no. No, no, no no no no!

  "Arrrgh!" I shouted, and tore myself out of Bodie's hold, the hood of my guidesuit coming off in his hand. I stumbled to my feet, bounced off a pillar, and with my head spinning, I stumbled away from a stalking Randall.

  "Todd," he said, sounding almost happy. "Never did learn to keep your nose out of other people's business, did you?" He whipped the control rod through the air, to remind me he was armed and I wasn't. "Tell me, do I need to just smash that nose to clue you in? Or am I going to smash in your whole head, before you learn the lesson?" The smile on his face widened; the psycho was seriously enjoying this.

  So stupid. Those words actually fell out of my mouth; I hadn't meant to speak them, but there was no room inside my head. "so stupid -" It was. It was so stupid. I was going to die here, and my dying would be stupid, and I would die with freaking "London Bridge is falling down" running through my head. Racing through my head, at top velocity, on infinite loop.

  It had to be from using my power more times today than in the past six months. London Bridge is falling down, falling down, warbled the chorus of cheery demented children in my skull, like squirrels on speed. The voice was "louder" than anything I'd ever "heard" in my head before, and all my attempts to open the mental gates and push it onto Randall or one of his gang were failing.

  Randall swung with the control rod, hitting a pillar. I whirled and dashed away, putting distance between us. He didn't run after me, because he didn't need to. There was no way out for me. I knew it, he knew it, and it brought him such joy he seriously started whistling a tune.

  A tune. A tune. That had been my secret weapon, that had been my plan. Some song from the childhood I shared with Randall, some song I knew would white him out with rage. Keep him from thinking. Except keeping me from thinking. Exactly what London damn Bridge was doing. To me. I did my best thinking in words, and now I couldn't remember a single word of that secret weapon song.

  "Cat got your tongue, Todd?" Randall taunted. "You've always got such smart words, man, where are they now? What do you think is going to save you?"

  Nothing was going to save me. The SOS programmed into my meshie might save the others. Me, for standing, I was going to die, skull bashed in by caveman's club. My mind's eye could see kindergarten Randall, teacher barely restraining him as a simple taunting ditty sent him into rabid fury—and I could not hear a bit of it, not over "London Bridge is falling round." Wait a minute, that's not right...

  Pain raked across my side and exploded onto my leg; I hadn't dodged back far enough from Randall's descending strike. He laughed as I shrieked, and even harder when I smacked my head against a pillar trying to back away from him. "You and Jared and everybody else who ever laughed at me behind my back. I'll show you." I tried to protest that I hadn't done that, but I couldn't speak, and he wouldn't have listened if I'd managed. "Everyone who thought they were smarter than me. Everyone who thought they were so funny and clever, calling me 'Randall the Nutt!'"

  Well, damn. Nice to be handed back my secret weapon.

  Launching myself straight at him was a suici
dal move, and that made it the last one he expected. I clamped an arm over his shoulder and shouted the same words at his ear that I was mentally bombarding him with, both as loud and fast and overwhelming as I could get. "I'm a little acorn ROUND!! Sitting on the cold, cold GROUND!! Everybody steps on ME; that is why I'm CRACKED you see!! I'm a nut, I'm a nut, I'm a NUT, NUT, NUT!! I'm a nut, I'm a nut—"

  He bellowed and wrenched himself out of the sloppy hold I had him in. He staggered away, clutching his head with both hands, including the one holding the control rod. I was still a dead man when he recovered from being thrown off balance, but if I could strike fast, I'd still get out the SOS before he split my head open. I threw myself after him and grabbed the control rod; before he could yank it away, my fingers scrabbled for, and found, the nubby button that authorized the opening of the safety doors.

  I expected that Randall would wrest the control rod away from me again, which he did. I expected him to come after me again, dropping all the cat-and-mouse games in his livid rage. Which he did.

  What I didn't expect, and didn't understand until later, was a rescue party already there at the safety door when it opened. Silhouetted in the light from outside, a cloaked figure raised his arms and intoned a mystic command: "Fogs of Fnagnar!" A billowing mist rolled with incredible rapidity across the floor; as soon as it touched Randall and me, our feet were stuck to the floor, and both of us struggled just to not topple over from our less-than-balanced positions.

  In my peripheral vision, I could see a bright flashing figure entering past Cloaky-Guy and darting around the arena. She moved at lightning speed—literally; she seemed to travel as a lightning bolt from spot to spot, solidifying in-between as a human for just long enough to shout out to her companions. "Two active!" she shouted from beside me, and then flashed in succession over to Archie and Bodie stuck to the floor, Jared's buddies still bound and gagged on their pillars, and then Jared himself. "Two down! Three, four down! Rescue target is down!" Trying to blink away the bright afterimages of the girl's travel, I looked at the distance from my pinned feet to Randall's, and the length of the metal rod in his hand, and felt sick to my stomach at the answer they combined to give.

  But the rescue party had one more member. Straight towards Randall and me, in a series of perfect front flips and backflips to turn any Olympic gymnast green with envy, hurtled a cheerleader, with blonde hair tied in floofy puffs and a sash in Claremont colors around the waist of her glittering, futuristic-fabric bodice-and-skirt costume. "Hostiles spotted! Give 'em justice!" she chanted, and came out of her last flip into a firing stance. Randall and I each had a pom-pom aimed at our faces; aside from the glowing light being blue rather than white, the swelling light and rising whine emanating from each pom-pom exactly resembled the charge-up cycle we'd all seen in news clips, of Charger Man firing his powerful blaster.

  As deaths go, I supposed dying quickly to friendly fire from a pretty girl was better than being beaten to death by Randall. Marginally. I gritted my teeth and waited for the pain. But the cheerleader's apple-green eyes widened as she looked at me, and she smiled. The pom-pom aimed at me stopped charging, and she dropped it to her hip. The one in Randall's face let out its accumulated light in one bright burst accompanied by a quick but loud zap! After she took it away from his face, Randall wobbled a few seconds, staring blankly. Then he toppled backward at the knees.

  I said the first thing that came to my head. "Thank you for not shooting me," I said.

  "What? Beamie didn't 'Stun 'em all and let God sort 'em out'?" The cloaked figure knelt by Jared's side, examining his broken signal watch and the possibly broken arm beneath, but it was the lightning girl taking apart the Blevins who'd spoken up to tease her teammate. Tall and Asian, the lightning girl wore a Claremont sash like the other two. She looked quickly in our direction and flashed me a smile that, well, made me feel a little fluttery, despite the circumstances. "How unusual for you, Beamie!"

  "We know Todd," retorted 'Beamie,' to my confusion. I'm pretty sure I would have remembered a cheerleader with stun-blasting pom-poms, it's the sort of thing that sticks in your mind. "He wouldn't go along with any plot that'd get people hurt."

  "Even when it's Starmont?" asked the cloaked figure sardonically. The way he spoke was disconcerting; his voice was young, but his growly tones sounded like he'd picked up his way of speaking from someone old and crotchety. "He's my own classmate, and yet I'm tempted to take a hammer to him regularly. Is that what they used, a hammer?"

  "Looked like a tack hammer, but yeah," I said.

  A gruff grunt. "What idiots. Why did they think destroying a signal watch wouldn't bring any attention, for Fnagnar's sake?"

  "If Randall Nutt was the brains of this operation," the cheerleader said, poking his thigh with her toe and eliciting a faint groan, "well, let's just say he always thought he had more brains than he really did. Am I right?" She arched an eyebrow at me.

  "Who are you?" I blurted. "You seem to know me and Randall, but if I'd ever met you, I'm sure—"

  She brought her pom-poms together above her head, and for a split-second, she was enveloped in a blue glow. When it disappeared, it took me just a few seconds to process the changes of years and recognize the person before me. "Barry? Barry Sullivan?!"

  "The same!" he said. "Well, actually, not quite the same as before, but..." He put his hand up for a high-five, but his grin wavered as I failed to put up my own: first from sheer shock, and then from shame at the memory of what I'd done to him.

  "I'm so sorry," I cut off whatever he'd started to say. "I didn't mean to—but I've been wanting to apologize all these years—"

  "For what?" he asked, brow wrinkled in confusion.

  I dropped my voice low, so that only he would hear, and started to explain my power, how it worked, and how he'd been its first recipient. I saw the dawn of realization in his eyes and waited for it to melt into justified anger, but when I broke off telling the story to apologize again, he wouldn't hear it.

  "Even if it happened just that way—I honestly don't remember," he said, "all you did was make me confront something I'd been running from." He took a deep breath. "I was ... acting badly, that year. Because I was realizing something about myself, that I just wasn't ready to accept. Instead, I tried to push it onto everyone else so they wouldn't suspect that I was ..."

  Oh. Suddenly the hyper-macho presentation, the jeering he'd aimed at any behavior he'd deemed 'girly'—they suddenly made sense, if he'd been really trying to deny that he was ...

  "... a soulhost for a descendant of mine, from a time centuries in our future, when Earth's main enforcers of justice on and off the planet are an elite group of psychically and technologically enhanced cheerleaders," he finished.

  A few seconds later, I managed to say "That sounds difficult to adjust to, yeah."

  "But I have, pretty much. I mean, I still find everything she claims about the Cosmic Cheerleader Corps difficult to believe, but—" He cocked his head as if listening to a voice no one else could hear. "Bee Mie says 'The Corps is absolutely Alpha-C real and if you go to the future you'll see for yourself.' Also, 'Barry, you're a jerk.'"

  "Whoa," said the Asian girl. "Mino, drop that arm and hold Jared really still."

  "I think the arm might be broken. Is this more important than that?"

  "I think so." The cloaked figure braced Jared while the Asian girl continued to disassemble the Blevins. She pushed things aside for room and then moved very slowly in taking out the next component.

  Jared started thrashing and yelling in pain the second the component was out, despite his cloaked classmate's restraint. The Asian girl's attention stayed on the component. All I could see as she held it up between her fingers was a tiny bit of white - but when electricity crackled through her fingers, I could hear the loud explosive pop and smell the acrid smoke released as the component turned black.

  She let out a held breath. "I think you owe your life to your friend here, Jared. Whether they screwed with
the fail-safe loop on purpose, or just messed up… Either way, I'm pretty sure that circuit would have failed, in an hour or so, and I've a hunch your heart and lungs would have shut down with it." Jared, not yet back to forming actual words, let out a noise of panicked protest.

  Barry looked at me and punched my shoulder, lightly. "Damn, man," he said with a grin, keeping his voice low. "Isn't it a rush? The first time you use your powers to save the day?"

  It turned out, pretty much everyone had reasons for wanting the incident kept quiet. Mr. Narse and the parent company he franchised from didn't want people associating SuperSims with danger. Claremont wasn't fully happy with their students' unsanctioned behavior, even if their rescue had saved lives (like mine.) And naturally, the Starmont clan had no desire to publicize how closely a plot to kidnap and ransom their heir had come to working.

  (Although on the subject of saving lives, I received a generous check in the mail a few weeks after the encounter, along with an anonymous but heartfelt note of gratitude for saving Jared. I guess there's some decent folks in that family after all.)

  I was 100% on board with keeping everything as quiet as possible. The story for public consumption was that I'd simply hidden in the arena, waited for Randall to put down the control rod, then grabbed it and used it to let in the rescue squad. I had to give the police and the Superhero Oversight Association the real story, including everything I knew about my power and what it could do, but unless they uncovered evidence that I'd used my power to do anything illegal or unethical, they were legally bound to keep my secret.

  The SOA still urged me to seek training for my power, to learn more fully its use and limitations, and plan a career that best put it to use. Barry and I met up at Busiek Elementary late one night to discuss the decision, bringing soda and a bag of chips with us. Bee Mie floated us up to the roof, and we sat there, legs over the edge, looking out at the playground and both agreeing it seemed so much smaller than we remembered.