“Surely a big strong guy like you is not afraid of a little old needle,” she said. Even though I knew she was buttering me up, I felt myself flush with pleasure. Her face was inches from mine. Her eyes were pools of dark caramel, chocolatey and sweet. She smelled of antiseptic, shampoo, and girl. Heavenly.
“Of course not,” I said. “I was afraid you were coming in for a kiss, is all. I never kiss on a first meeting.” Or much at all, really, but Jackie did not need to know that. I was pleased with myself for coming up with that line. I felt a little like James Bond. I felt vindicated from that weird hand twitching thing earlier. Maybe I was not completely hopeless.
Jackie’s eyes danced with amusement. She grinned at me. Her lips were blood red and glossed. If she had asked me to jump out the window at that moment, I would have done it gladly and with a song in my heart.
“Not kissing someone upon your first meeting is a good policy to have,” she said. “I’ll try to control myself. Now make a fist.”
I did as she told me. Even with my forearm flexed, it still looked like a big piece of overcooked spaghetti. I really needed to hit the gym more often. Jackie wiped at my forearm with a cotton ball that reeked of alcohol. I looked away right before she jabbed me with the needle. I had fainted once years before when I had made the mistake of watching a doctor give me a shot. I would not make the same mistake again, especially not in front of a hot girl like Jackie. I did not want to ruin my smooth as James Bond moment. I did not remember James Bond ever once fainting, much less fainting in front of his love interest.
Jackie looked up at me. She saw that I was not looking at the needle sticking out of my arm. “Another reason why we draw blood is to determine what your powers are. We are required by law to keep a record of the powers of each registered Metahuman. We also use your blood to determine what level of Meta you are.” I had the feeling she was talking to help distract me from the needle. She was not only pretty, she was a good nurse. Pretty and capable? A dream come true. Mrs. Jackie Conley had such a nice ring to it. “There are three Metahuman levels, from least powerful to most: Alpha, Beta, and Omega. The vast majority of Metas are Betas. Only a tiny sliver of the Metahuman population is Alpha or Omega. Unless you are exceptionally unusual, you are almost certainly a Beta.” Outside of the context of Metahumans, a beta was someone who was unremarkable and all but invisible, the opposite of an alpha male. Though of course Jackie did not mean it that way, being a beta was the story of my life.
“There. All done,” Jackie said. She pulled the needle out of my arm. I ventured a peek at it now that it was longer sucking me dry like a vampire. Okay, a slight exaggeration. So sue me. A fat bulb filled with my precious red blood was at the end of the hypodermic.
Jackie straightened up. She smiled down at me in approval, as if mine was the best batch of blood she had ever seen in her life. She turned, put a cap on the needle and put it down, and turned back around with a small bandage in her hands. I was hyper-aware of her touch as she applied the bandage to where she had jabbed me. Did her hands linger for a bit longer than necessary on my arm? Probably wishful thinking. I wondered if she was into dating younger men who drove powder blue vehicles that were half-car and half-aquarium, at least when it rained.
“I’m going to go back to the lab and run your blood sample through our computer,” Jackie said as she peeled off her gloves. “It will be just a few minutes. Now you make yourself at home until I get back.” She walked back down the hallway. I followed her with my eyes until she disappeared from view through another door. She did not walk so much as she sashayed. It was mesmerizing.
“I never kiss on a first meeting?” Dad said, repeating my words from earlier. I jumped, startled. I had been so taken with Jackie I had forgotten Dad was sitting merely feet away. I shifted in my seat, embarrassed.
“Don’t be jealous of my silver tongue,” I finally managed.
“I’m not jealous of it. I’m admiring it. I should be writing this stuff down for later use,” he teased. The fact of the matter was that Dad had not gone out with any women since Mom had died. A couple of years ago, I had asked Dad why he never dated or remarried after Mom passed away.
“I have yet to meet a woman who even begins to hold a candle to your mother,” he had said. “If I ever do, maybe I’ll go out with her. Until then—” he had trailed off with a shrug. I often wondered if he was lonely. All he did was work, work, work. Mom’s prolonged illness had blown through the family’s savings, plus some. Dad was still digging his way out of debt. After Mom died, Dad’s lawyer had suggested that he declare bankruptcy to get from under the crushing load of debt. Dad had ignored his advice. He simply worked even harder than before on the farm. He had worked plenty hard before Mom died—he was almost always in the fields before dawn and not return until nightfall—so I would not have thought him working even harder was possible had I not witnessed it with my own two eyes. “Even mountains can be moved if you chip away at them long enough and don’t quit,” Dad always said. Another Jamesism.
About ten minutes or so passed before we saw Jackie again. She opened the door of the room she had gone into. She stared at me with an odd look on her face. She then hurried deeper down the hall and knocked on and opened a different door. She entered the room, closing the door behind herself.
After a minute or so Jackie came out again. She was followed by a tall, very heavy man wearing grey dress pants, suspenders that swelled out over his big belly, and a white dress shirt and black tie. He looked at me from down the hall with interest and barely concealed excitement. They both went into the room Jackie had taken my blood into. Despite the fact they closed the door behind themselves, I heard voices raised in excitement.
I looked at Dad. He appeared as puzzled as I felt.
“What do you suppose that’s all about?” I asked. Dad shrugged.
After a few more minutes, Jackie and the heavyset man came out again, this time followed by a thin older man in khakis and a polo shirt. The older man had a long white goatee. It made me think of a billy goat. The three of them came towards us.
“Gentlemen,” Jackie said to me and Dad, “this is Lance Priebus, the director of the center I told you about before.” The heavyset man in the suspenders nodded his head at us. His brown hair was closely cropped on the sides of his head, and longer on the top. “And this is Floyd, our office technician,” Jackie said, referring to the older man with the goatee. Floyd was staring at me behind his thin glasses, like I was an elephant and he had never seen one before. His stare made me uncomfortable.
Jackie wore gloves again. She pulled a fresh needle out of a package. “We need to take a second blood sample,” she said. Ugh. Despite the fact a second blood sample would mean Jackie would have to touch me again, one needle in my arm had been too many as far as I was concerned.
“Why?” I asked, already dreading the thought of being poked again. “Is there some kind of problem?”
“Not at all,” Mr. Priebus said, speaking for the first time. His voice was deep, rumbly, and matched his size. “We just got some unusual results with the first sample and we need to get a second sample to confirm them.”
“Can’t I just pee in a cup or something instead?” I asked hopefully.
“Afraid not,” Mr. Priebus said. “It has to be your blood.”
I wanted to tell them I would not give them any more of my blood. I really did not like needles. What did they think I was, a blood bank? Dad must have read what I was thinking on my face.
“Give them your arm again Theo,” he said firmly. I sighed. Dad did not give orders very often, but when he did, he expected results.
I stretched out my arm again, making a fist. After cleaning my forearm with alcohol again, Jackie stuck the fresh needle in my arm, not too far from where she had put the other needle in. I turned my head away again. I felt vaguely faint. Maybe this place did not register Metahumans at all. Maybe it was a front for vampires. Maybe Jackie and her friends planned to drain me dry, one n
eedle at a time. Or, maybe I read too many urban fantasy novels.
Mr. Priebus and Floyd looked at me carefully as Jackie finished drawing my blood, like they were examining me under a microscope. Now I knew how amebas felt. Jackie pulled the needle out, capped it, and applied another bandage to my arm. The three of them then went back down the hallway. Floyd kept glancing at me over his shoulder. The urge to stick my tongue out at him was almost more than I could resist. The three went back into the room where Jackie had first disappeared with my blood. They closed the door behind them.
A happy thought occurred to me. I looked at Dad, excitement rising in me.
“Do you suppose I’m not a Meta after all?” I asked him eagerly. “Maybe that’s why they need to retest me.”
“Explain what happened in the USCA bathroom, then,” Dad said. “And, what about the waves you see coming off of your hands?” I looked down at my hands again. The waves were still very much there. Then again, I was the only one who could see them. Maybe they were just a figment of my imagination. And, maybe I had thrown the Three Horsemen around not with superpowers, but with mere muscle power. Mothers were known to lift cars off of their trapped children thanks to surges of adrenaline. Maybe I was just crazy and imagined seeing the waves emanating from my hands; maybe I had gotten crazy strong in the USCA bathroom due to a rush of adrenaline. Honestly, I almost would have preferred being crazy over being a Metahuman. Less dangerous. I never heard of an insane asylum patient being murdered the way Avatar had been.
I was about to find out it was not I, but my situation, that was crazy.
CHAPTER 3
“Theodore, you are an Omega-level telekinetic,” Mr. Priebus said. Dad and I sat across from him at his desk in his office in the back of the Metahuman Registration Center. He had summoned my Dad and I back here once they had finished testing my blood for the second time.
My mouth was open. I closed it, realizing I must have looked like a fool with my mouth hanging open. I had heard of people’s jaws dropping before, but never had I heard something so impossible to believe that my own jaw had done it.
“B-b-b-but that impossible,” I sputtered. “Avatar was an Omega-level Metahuman. He was invulnerable, he could fly, he had super speed and strength, and each of his senses operated on a superhuman level. It’s said he could move the Moon out of its orbit if he had wanted to, and that he could hear a feather hit the ground from miles away. All I did was toss three football players around. There must be some kind of mistake.”
Mr. Priebus shook his head firmly.
“There is no mistake,” he said definitively. “Our equipment does not lie. That’s why I wanted your blood tested for a second time to be absolutely sure. You are an Omega-level Metahuman. Your power is to move things with your mind. From what you have told me, you apparently channel that power through your hands.”
Dad looked confused. “I’m sorry, but what does being an Omega-level Metahuman even mean?” he asked. Dad was not a fanboy of licensed Heroes like I was, so he did not understand the Metahuman lingo like I did. I was still too dumbstruck to explain it to him. “The nurse told us there are three kinds of Metahumans. Alphas, Betas, and Omegas. Each one more powerful than the last. But what exactly does it mean that my son is an Omega-level Metahuman?”
“It means Theodore is one of the most powerful Metahumans alive. Or at least he has the potential to be,” Mr. Priebus said. He picked up a pen with his big beefy hand and made some quick scribbles on a pad of paper. “Think of Metahuman abilities as being distributed on a bell curve. They usually manifest for the first time when someone is in their teens. Like Theodore.” He lifted the pad and turned it around so we could see it. On the paper he had sketched what looked like a large mountain with a tall peak, the sides of which tapered away at each end. Mr. Priebus pointed to the left side of the drawing. “On the left side of the bell curve are the least powerful of the Metahumans. These are the Alphas. They possess abilities that normal humans do not, but those abilities are very weak. A young lady I know who is an Alpha-level Meta has the ability to turn her eyes’ irises any color she wishes. That is something a normal person obviously can’t do, but it is hardly a world-changing power. Only a handful of Metahumans are Alphas.”
Mr. Priebus’ finger crept up the slope of the curve he had drawn. “The vast majority of Metahumans fall into the middle of this bell curve. These are the Betas. Almost all licensed Heroes and Rogues—that’s the technical term for supervillains—are Betas. Betas have the ability to do things normal humans can only dream of. Fly, control animals with their mind, transform into metal, lift thousands of pounds, that sort of thing.” Mr. Priebus’s finger continued moving over the hump of the bell curve and down its slope until it got to the right edge of the drawing.
“And here is where the most powerful of all the Metahumans are,” he said, visibly excited. I was not excited. If anything, I felt sick. “The Omegas. Omegas possess the kind of power that can literally destroy the world.”
“Destroy the world?” I interjected. I was still in disbelief. I could not even get laid, much less destroy the world. “All I did was toss some football players around,” I said again. I did not want to be a Metahuman, Omega-level or otherwise. I looked down at my hands again. The waves coming from them almost seemed to be mocking me.
“Yes, but what will you be capable of when your powers further develop and mature?” Mr. Priebus said. “What if you decide to shift some tectonic plates under the world’s oceans and cause worldwide tidal waves? What if you decided to move the Earth closer to the sun and kill all life as we know it?” His eyes shined with excitement. He looked like he hoped I would do it, and he would grab a tub of popcorn and watch.
“I can’t move the Earth closer to the sun. All I did was toss some football players around.” I sounded like a broken record. I did not care. There had to be some sort of mistake. Dad reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. He was trying to reassure me. It was not working.
“You say there are only a handful of Omega-level Metahumans. How many others are there?” Dad asked Mr. Priebus.
“Well, Avatar was Omega-level, but he died a few months ago. Theodore here is the first Omega-level Metahuman I personally have discovered.” Mr. Priebus made it sound like he personally gave birth to me right after he discovered penicillin and split the atom. “Other than Theodore, there are three known living Omega-level Metas. There’s Millennium, a licensed Hero who, like Avatar was, is on the Sentinels. The Sentinels are a team of licensed superheroes headquartered in Astor City, Maryland.” I doubted Mr. Priebus needed to say that part. Even Dad must have known who the Sentinels were. They were probably the most famous group of superheroes in the world. “Then there’s the Rogue named Chaos. He’s in prison in the federal Metahuman Holding Facility in Maryland after having almost destroyed the city of Chicago a few years back. Lastly, there is a five-year-old Omega-level Metahuman in Beijing, China named Liam Qiaolian.” Mr. Priebus paused. “Actually it would be more accurate to say Liam is over seventy-five years-old. She’s been in a self-induced coma for over seventy years. So, Millennium is the only active Omega, and the only one who is a Hero.”
Dad let out a long breath. It was not every day you found out your son was one of the four most powerful people on Earth. Imagine how I felt. Hint: Not good.
“Okay, now that you’ve determined that Theodore is an Omega-level Metahuman, what’s the next step?” Dad asked. He sounded tired. A wave of guilt washed over me. With Dad working as hard as he did to get out of debt, he had plenty on his plate as it was. The last thing he needed was to have to help me deal with something else. Especially when the something else was this big.
“After we finish talking, Floyd will help Theodore complete the registration process. We’ll get his fingerprints, a retinal scan, get all of his contact information, that sort of thing. If Theodore does not intend to use his powers, he does not need to do anything else other than to make sure to keep his contact infor
mation current with the U.S. Department of Metahuman Affairs. The USDMA is the agency that runs this registration center and all the registration centers across the country. And, Theodore also has to be sure to not use his powers, of course. As you probably know, under the Hero Act of 1945, a Metahuman is only allowed to use his powers if he first receives a license to do so.” Mr. Priebus settled back in his chair, with his hands folded over his big belly. He took on a professorial air. I could easily imagine him as one of my college professors. “The Hero Act was passed in order to protect the public from the powers of Metahumans. In 1945, an American Metahuman named John Tilly, concerned about the mounting casualties caused by World War Two, flew to Japan and used his powers to set off nuclear explosions in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered shortly thereafter. To this day historians still argue about whether Tilly’s actions made Japan surrender, or if it was on the brink of giving up anyway. To some Tilly is a hero who saved countless lives. It would have been a bloodbath had the Allies needed to invade the Japanese homeland to force their surrender. To others, Tilly was a homicidal madman who was meddling in events he barely understood.
“Regardless of which camp one falls into, one thing became clear as a result of Tilly’s actions: Metahumans could not be allowed to run amok with no regulation or supervision. That was why the Hero Act was passed into law. The government did not want Metahumans using their powers unless they were trained to do so and unless they used them in the public interest. Most of the industrialized world has followed the U.S.’s lead and has put laws in place similar to the Hero Act. Under the Hero Act, all Metahumans must register with the federal government and must agree to not use their powers unless they first train and become licensed to use them. Registering, of course, is what you will be doing here today. Licensed Metahumans are known as Heroes; unlicensed Metahumans who use their powers anyway are known as Rogues.” Mr. Priebus smiled slightly. “Or, in the more common vernacular, superheroes and supervillains. Avatar and the Sentinels are licensed Heroes or superheroes. Chaos is an example of a Rogue or supervillain.”
Omega Superhero 1: Caped Page 3