Fire and Thunder

by Bowen Greenwood

  Pitch was the slightly pudgy young man with light brown hair who had sat by himself at breakfast. He took Terri under his wing and led her around.

  “This is the top floor of Sol Tower,” he said. “Obviously, the rest of the building is the famous casino. Mr. Moses owns it or part of it anyway. He’s really rich. So this top floor is set aside for us. He gets the hotel catering staff to bring up food every day. It’s pretty cool, but the last place I was had a cooler system.

  “Sol is Latin for the sun, of course. But here at the Sons of Thunder, God’s a big part of life, so we call it the Tower of the Son. With an O, not a U. Because, you know, Jesus – Son of God, and all that. I guess it’s a pretty old Christian pun to mix up sun and son. I don’t really know.”

  As he shrugged, Terri asked him, “Do you believe in God?”

  Pitch gave every appearance of a football player, with his broad shoulders and thick arms that stretched his T-shirt. He walked with his hands in his pockets so when he shrugged, his T-shirt looked tight and cramped.

  “I don’t really know yet. Until I came here, I would have said I didn’t care. God can exist or not; it’s no big deal to me. But now I don’t know. If my power really does come from God, then I figure I ought to do what he says so I don’t lose it.”

  “So you have a power, too?”

  “Yeah. I’m telekinetic. Mr. Moses calls it ‘moving mountains.’ Whatever. I think about an object and imagine it moving, and it does.”

  The luxurious décor of the conference room continued in the hallway down which they walked. At regular intervals, statues and busts sat on pedestals along the walls. Now, Pitch demonstrated with one of them. A white marble statue of someone wearing a toga floated up off its stand, drifting to hover in front of Terri’s face. Pitch put it back on the pedestal without so much as a gesture.

  She stared at him and said, “It seems like every time I turn around today, I see something more amazing.”

  Pitch shrugged. “I’m pretty used to it by now.”

  He led Terri down the hallway. Marble floors and wood-paneled walls complimented vast skylights that let in the gleaming light of the Las Vegas summer.

  Terri observed, “This Moses guy must be really rich.”

  “Yeah. No kidding. Anyway, down this hall, we all have rooms. We all live here.”

  “Live here? So everyone’s parents know about this? The superpowers, I mean? And they’re OK with it? What I’m saying is you all seem to be kind of young to be living somewhere without your parents knowing about it.”

  “Ha! We’re young? What are you, like 20 maybe?”

  “I told you already at breakfast, I’m 23.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I’ve been kind of distracted this morning. I guess someone who’s out of college has enough room to call me young. I’d be a freshman next fall, except that we’re trying to organize a school here so we don’t have to go out to a normal college where we might be found.

  “Anyway, you were asking about parents. Well, some of us here come from really religious families, like Anna and her sister. Their parents know everything, and they’re totally cool with it. But a lot of us, not so much. I ditched out on my mom when I went to join the Legion. Mr. Moses doesn’t put any pressure on me about it, but I know he thinks I should tell her where I am.”

  “The Legion? Is that another name for the Sons of Thunder?”

  “No. The Legion are the other guys. Mr. Moses mentioned them at breakfast. I suppose I should think of them as bad guys, but I’m not quite there yet. Not everyone who has a gift like this thinks it comes from God. Some people think it comes from wanting it bad enough and being willing to sacrifice for it. They have their own organization. They’re pretty hardcore about rebelling against the government and taking over the country. Most of them are angry at the government for the way they put people like us in prison and run all these tests on them.”

  “Prison?”

  If Pitch detected anything off in her voice, he gave no sign.

  “Yeah, I guess prison might not be the right word. None of us ever got a trial. But the government’s very interested in what’s going on with these powers – gifts, whatever. Whenever they find someone who has a gift, they catch them, hold them and run tests on them. That makes a lot of the people in the Legion really mad because the tests aren’t always exactly gentle. So the Legion, they’re out for revenge. They’re going to get the government back for the tests that were run on them and change things so the people with powers run things.”

  “So you used to be in the ‘Legion’ but now you’re part of the ‘Sons of Thunder?’”

  Pitch sighed and looked away. “Yeah.”

  “It’s a sore point?” she asked, taking the message from his body language rather than his words. “Why’d you switch?”

  He took his time before answering.

  “I did a lot of bad things when I was in the Legion. Things I want to make up for. I joined the Sons of Thunder to get started on that. Problem is half the people I need to make up to are still in the Legion.”

  He turned away to end the conversation, leading Terri into a door at the far end of the hall, which opened into a broad, wide-open room with no furniture at all. The empty hardwood floor made it look perfect for dancing. That made Terri sigh. She hadn’t been out on a date in… too long.

  “Connor teaches martial arts classes in here. There will be one in about an hour. You should come, unless Mr. Moses wants you to do something else. I know he wants to talk to you.”

  “Wants to talk to me?” Alarm spread over Terri’s face at that.

  “Yeah. That was the whole point of Connor’s mission this morning – to bring you back here. I don’t know all the details, but there’s some prophecy about you.”

  “Prophecy? About me?” Now Terri focused in on Pitch’s words and appearance tightly, wanting to pull every detail from his tone and his facial expressions.

  He nodded again. “That’s Mr. Moses’ gift. Kila can do something similar. Anyway, I don’t know exactly what the prophecy was, but I figure you must be a big deal. What’s your power, anyway?”

  Terri looked at her feet and shrugged. It was a highly suspicious situation. That she should encounter an organization like this, right while she was in the middle of…

  She reminded herself that Pitch was waiting for an answer. “I don’t have one.”

  Terri needed to learn everything she could about this mysterious group that appeared miraculously – literally – in her life right as she was on her first big assignment, so she stared at Pitch’s face to see how he reacted to her answer.

  “Really? Nothing? Then why did we send Connor out to bring you back, anyway?”

  Pitch walked Terri to a room with a locked door and handed her a key. He said, “I don’t know if you’re going to stay with us or not. Seems weird to have someone with no thunder in the Sons of Thunder. But if you do, here’s your room. Mr. Moses put some stuff in there for you. Can you find your way back to the dojo?”

  “Where?”

  “The dojo. The big room with the hardwood floor where Connor teaches us to fight.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, just down this hall and around the corner, right?”

  “Yup. Come on down when you’ve changed. We’ll be starting in about half an hour.”

  Terri watched him walk away. Pitch seemed innocent enough, other than the telekinesis. But her work was highly classified, and this encounter presented ample cause for suspicion. Pitch and the so-called Sons of Thunder were about as far out of the ordinary as it was possible to get.

  She turned to look into the room she had been assigned. She saw white clothes laid out on the bed. When she stepped closer, she could tell they were the loose-fitting garments people wore for martial arts classes.

  Terri hadn’t been exactly honest with Pitch or the other Sons of Thunder so far. The idea that all of this came from God was new to her. But the powers – and the existence of the Legion – those weren’t new.


  ***

  As Connor and his friends winked out of existence, Drake Tesla walked over to the spot where they’d been. Curiously, he pressed the toe of his right foot to the ground, as if testing to see if it was solid. Light brown strands of hair that hung past his jawline fluttered in front of his face in the morning breeze. Goosebumps covered the muscles of his bare arms; his black tank top and fatigues were a little dusty from Connor throwing him to the ground.

  His hands suffered no ill effects from throwing fire.

  Sebastian, his flat top hair showing no signs that he’d just been in a fistfight, walked up beside him.

  From behind cars in the parking garage, two other people emerged and joined them. One, his blond hair shellacked to his scalp with a generous helping of gel, buried his hands in the pockets of his black fatigues. The other was a girl whose short black hair might have made her look like a boy except that she walked gracefully despite her combat boots. All four of them wore exactly the same clothes.

  “Looks like someone has the power to teleport,” the girl observed.

  “Is that Truth?” Sebastian asked. One could hear the capital letter in how he said it.

  The girl knew the Truth. Not always, not about everyone, not about everything. But when she knew, she knew. As Sebastian had the power to turn invisible, as Drake had the power to throw fire, Spooky had the power to know the truth sometimes. She earned her nickname because more than a few other kids found it “spooky” to have her tell them secrets about themselves.

  “It’s nothing to do with my power,” she answered Sebastian. “It’s just that they were here and now they’re not. And the last thing I heard her say had something to do with being back at their headquarters. You don’t need abnormal abilities to put two and two together and get teleportation.”

  Sebastian ran a hand through what there was of his hair. “Yeah, and that bit about a headquarters made me think. It sure looks like Connor’s forming a group to compete with the Legion. I’m not going to let him get away with that. I warned him.”

  Drake ignored him, but the two other kids nodded grimly.

  Sebastian Crest discovered something marvelous about a year ago. Back in high school, he had never been one of the popular kids. He had known they gossiped and whispered about him when he wasn’t looking. He had just known it, and he had longed for a way to find out what they said. He had imagined they made fun of his inability to get onto sports teams or his cheap clothes from Walmart that his brother wore before he did. But they never gossiped about him where he could hear them. Oh no, they were too chicken for that.

  Until one day it had happened. He had walked in front of a group of his fellow high school seniors and they hadn’t seen him.

  Somehow, he had developed the ability to make himself invisible. He had wanted it bad enough, for long enough, and studied the idea enough, that it had finally happened.

  Of course, the kids hadn’t been talking about him then, but that had hardly mattered. Sebastian could become un-seeable whenever he wanted! It was easier to dress cool when you could steal the clothes you needed. It was way easier to get good grades when the teacher couldn’t see you looking at other people’s papers.

  Nothing good lasts forever, though. After a particularly stupid idea to sneak into the girls’ locker room, he had discovered that invisible and undiscoverable differed by leaps and bounds. One was a power that came easily to him. To do the other, you had to stay out of people’s way.

  He had gotten bumped by the girls coming back in from gym class, had been knocked to the ground, and had become visible.

  The gym teacher had sent him to the principal. When he used his power to sneak out of that office, the school had called the police. When he used his invisibility to try to escape, the mystified police had called someone higher up the chain.

  Her name was Maven Flake, and she worked for the federal government. Her job was to study kids like Sebastian.

  He had learned that he was not unique. All around the world, high school students like him were developing unexplainable abilities. The authorities had created a special agency to study the phenomenon and put Ms. Flake in charge of it.

  Eventually, he had escaped from Flake, along with a number of other young people she kept in her cells. Once away, they had decided to band together to get back at the government agents for holding them prisoner. They had stayed together. They had worked together. Using their powers, they had built a secret place to live together. They had started calling themselves the Legion.

  One day, they had tried to bring the bulletproof Connor Merritt into their group. He had acted all stuck up and snooty about it, though, and refused to join. Now, apparently, he was forming a similar group. Sebastian and his allies had just encountered them.

  This was not as big a deal to Drake, apparently. With an angry snarl, he interrupted the blond boy’s memories.

  “I don’t care about Connor forming a group!”

  His green eyes flashed as he balled his fists. “You promised me Pitch, Sebastian. Not some jumped-up kickboxer in a biker jacket. Pitch!”

  “Connor’s more than a jumped-up kickboxer. Didn’t you see him get shot and not even slow down? His skin stops bullets! He’s got a power just like we do.”

  “Who cares? He didn’t… It’s not him I want to kill, Sebastian. It’s Pitch. And you. So keep your promise and bring me Pitch. Or if you’re not going to keep your end of the deal, I’m not going to keep mine.”

  The boy with the slicked back hair said, “Easy, Drake. Spooky said this would lead to Pitch. You know that when she says she knows the truth, she’s never wrong. Just be patient.”

  Drake whirled and grabbed the blond boy by his tank top. “Your girlfriend isn’t dead, Linc! You don’t know what it’s like!”

  Sebastian wasn’t that surprised by the sudden outburst of violence. He knew it was risky to bring Drake along today. He hadn’t gone out on a mission since… well, the founding of the Legion hadn’t been peaceful. Some people got hurt, and Drake still carried a grudge about that.

  Before Drake could get any more words out, Lincoln Blunt shifted his weight, moved one hand in from the side to break the two-handed grip on his shirt, and knocked the same hand into Drake’s temple. Then his other fist slammed into Drake’s gut, and the longer-haired boy doubled over in pain.

  Linc’s power? Super speed. Getting physical with him meant getting hit first, second, third, and fourth. Confined to his quarters since Linc had joined Legion, Sebastian knew Drake had heard the gossip about Linc’s power, but he had never learned about it the hard way before.

  Spooky got behind Lincoln and wrapped her arms around his chest and biceps, pulling him back.

  “Back off, both of you!” Sebastian shouted. “Fighting each other doesn’t get us anywhere. Drake, Spooky said we would get revenge on Pitch if we found Terri Jackson, and when Spooky knows, Spooky knows. You can hold your temper until we find him, or we can leave you behind. It’s all the same to me either way, so choose: are you on the team or not?”

  Drake straightened up from being punched in the gut, grinding his teeth and clenching his fists. He didn’t say anything.

  “Say it, Drake. On the team or not. I hear you say it, or you’re done.”

  “Fine. I’m in ‘til we find Pitch. No promises after that, Sebastian. Got it? You’re still number two on a list that only has two names on it.” He paused, looked at Lincoln, and added, “Or, that used to only have two names.”

  Sebastian nodded once, and then turned away. He knelt down and picked up a smartphone that lay discarded on the ground. He passed it over to Drake.

  “Our mugging victim dropped this before Connor saved her. Spooky says she’s the key to finding Pitch. So, Drake, since you’re so eager to have first shot at him, take the cell phone and wait for her.

  “She’ll come back for it.”

  Chapter 5

  Connor and Mr. Moses sat at the conference table. The elder man sat at the hea
d, the younger just to his right.

  “This is more dangerous than anything we’ve seen from the Legion before,” Connor said. “That guy could summon fireballs. It was exactly like the verse in the Bible we took our name from.”

  The story was one of the most commonly told in the Tower of the Son. When Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to be crucified, he tried to stop for the night in a town, but the people there didn’t welcome him. His disciples James and John suggested, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from Heaven to destroy them?” Jesus, of course, told them not to do such a thing. No one knew if that incident was the reason he took to calling those two disciples Sons of Thunder, but Connor and his friends felt like it was an appropriate illustration, so they cited those verses frequently.

  Now Connor quoted it again and added, “I never thought about what it would have looked like if they actually had called down fire from Heaven, but this morning I saw it. The Legion has someone who can do exactly that. To me, that’s a major threat.”

  “It’s a very dangerous power,” Mr. Moses agreed. “It’s also dangerously close to the message from God that came to me last night.”

  “I thought of that, too, Mr. Moses. ‘Millions die in fire unless you find Terri Jackson.,’ and here’s a guy who slings fire. I want to find him and stop him. I’ll teach him not to set people on fire.”

  “Don’t set out for revenge, Mr. Merritt.” The elder man shot Connor a steady look.

  He went on. “I know you’re angry. It’s natural. I would be too if someone set me on fire. I can only imagine the pain. Don’t be ashamed of it.

  “But God didn’t tell us to stop the man who can throw fire. He told us to find Terri Jackson. You did that. Good work.”

  Connor stifled a growl in his throat and nodded. He knew what Mr. Moses would say. Forgive Mr. Fireball. Try to help him see the light. But he wasn’t there yet. Memory of the pain still lingered. So he changed the subject.

  “OK, so how come you sent the woman out for a tour of our place when we should be talking to her about how she’s going to stop this guy from killing millions of people?”