by Drew Hayes
“Is this a good slow clap moment? Because it kind of feels like a good slow clap moment.”
7.
Vince rubbed his head as he and the others walked among the late summer foliage that decorated the Lander campus. He’d been healed, of course. They all had. But somehow he felt like something still smarted. Were Vince the introspective sort, he might have considered the possibility that it was his pride.
“Yeesh, I feel like I’m still walking funny,” Nick complained, his own gait easily on par with the others despite his protests. “Next time I’m pinning a note to my shirt: ‘Do not let Ed heal.’”
“Who is Ed?” Alice asked.
“One of the junior year healers. What’s wrong with Ed?” Roy answered and asked.
“His power just speeds up the body’s natural healing to light speed. I prefer the ones that make it like it never happened,” Nick explained.
“You want some cheese with that whine?” Mary said snidely.
“No, but I would like some original content in your insults,” Nick shot back. “I’m just saying, electricity can have long term effects. What if it had screwed with my nervous system, or worse, dulled my rapier wit?”
“We’d finally have proof of a just and loving God?” Alice ventured.
“Ha. Ha. Just for that I’m not listening to your votes on what to watch for our welcome back movie marathon,” Nick snapped.
“Oh no, please, please, please be joking,” Mary’s soft voice implored.
“Come on, how else do you want to celebrate our return to Lander than by engaging in our traditional form of revelry?”
“Literally, I mean literally, anything else,” Alice said.
“Fine then. Whipped cream orgy it is.”
“Is it sad that I’d almost prefer that to more slasher flicks?” Mary asked.
“At this point, no,” Vince agreed as he opened the Melbrook front door. The five students piled in and down the hallway, entering the common room to find a set of unexpected guests awaiting them.
“Good afternoon,” Mr. Transport said, flashing them a wide smile. Mr. Numbers was more subdued in his greeting, merely offering a curt nod to his charges as they meandered into view.
“You guys are back!” Vince cried happily. Despite the dean’s assurance, Vince had remained worried about what repercussion the Mr.’s would face for their role in Mary’s rescue.
“Of course,” Mr. Transport confirmed. “I’m sorry we’re a bit late, there were a few final loose ends to wrap up before we were able to return. I trust you had a good orientation?”
“Good? Why, it was downright... shocking.”
It’s hard to say who threw the first light punch into Nick’s shoulder for that awful pun, but it was easily observable that everyone joined in before he cried out for mercy.
“It was interesting,” Mary reported more factually. “Looks like second year is a lot different from the first.”
“In more ways than one,” Roy tacked on.
“So we’ve been briefed,” Mr. Numbers said. “It will be hard. Try to keep up.”
“What Mr. Numbers means to say is that we have faith you five will make us proud and all do well enough to make it to third year,” Mr. Transport hastily added.
“Sure,” Mr. Numbers said, in a tone that one could take as an agreement, were they feeling particularly generous.
“Well, glad as we all are to see you, we were already deep in a discussion about how to spend our evening,” Nick said, steering the conversation back toward his original goal.
“Uggggh.” The groan came from both the gathered students and, if one were listening quite carefully, was slightly augmented by a small contribution from the pursed lips of Mr. Numbers.
* * *
Carl sat in his new office, a formerly paper-cluttered mess that had been scrubbed clean of all documents in the course of the recent investigation. He drank a glass of water and eyed the small white pills in front of him. It was ludicrous to him that he could transform into living lighting, fight off an entire room of young bucks, and yet his doctor was still lecturing him on the importance of monitoring his cholesterol. It seemed like a horrible prank perpetrated on him by the cosmos. Still, Carl Fletcher was a pragmatic man, so he swallowed the pills along with a mouthful of water and grimaced at the bitter taste.
A light hand knocked on his door, then slid the wooden barrier open without waiting for a response. Carl glanced up to see a tall man with dark shaggy hair waltz in and plop down in a chair positioned directly before the desk.
“That,” Sean Pendleton said, “was truly stupendous. I mean, a masterful display of skill and power woven together in a tapestry of ass-kicking.”
“Thanks,” Carl replied, taking another draw from his water.
“A sight like that, it speaks to a lifetime of experience. Certainly years spent in active combat, not to mention extensive training beforehand.”
“They don’t exactly hire rookies to teach here,” Carl deflected.
“Oh no, certainly not. In fact, generally speaking, only Heroes with exceptional pedigrees and pristine records are even considered for these positions. I say generally because I believe you and I are exceptions to that rule. You see I, in case you weren’t aware, am a convicted thief on the grandest of scales. And you, well, you are a no one,” Sean said.
“Aren’t you just a charmer?”
“I don’t mean it as an insult, I meant it literally. See a talent like yours coupled with the skill you showed would hardly go unnoticed, even in the world of Heroes. But I’ve never seen or heard of any Hero with your particular talents, and I even went to the trouble of doing some digging after the spectacle. You aren’t a criminal either; I certainly would have heard of someone like you running in that circle. So that leaves you as a nobody. Which presents quite the conundrum.” Sean leaned forward at this point and lowered his voice. “Because, you see, I know why I was chosen to replace Persephone. And given the situation at hand, I can only conclude that Dean Blaine tapped you for precisely the same reason.”
“Trust,” Carl surmised, his own tone matching the low audibility of Sean’s.
“Right on the money,” Sean said. “Dean Blaine is in quite a precarious position, and as such seems bent on surrounding himself with personnel he can count on. Now, I know why I’m perceived as loyal. You, however, remain something of an enigma to me.”
“While everything you’ve said is true, I fail to see how it’s any of your business,” Carl replied.
“Simply put? You and I were both brought here from the outside after a fantastic snafu. Now, while he would never want to admit it, two top employees going so far off the reservation must have shaken Blaine’s faith in his staff. And rightly so: we still have no real idea what the point of their little after-hours field trip was. So a logical person would be forced to assume that there is more going on than what is presented on the surface.”
“You’ve just said a lot without getting to the point.”
“My point, you cretin, is that in a program where every human cog is a potential Judas, the only people we can safely trust are the dean and one another. So I’m proposing we get to know each other a bit better, given the shaky alliance we find ourselves thrust into.”
Carl sighed and finished off his cup of water. At this rate his doctor would have him on stress medication, too.
8.
Vince sat on one of the many benches that littered the Lander campus, looking up at the stars. The wooden slats were hard against his back and the night was still a touch too summery to be truly comfortable, but to the former wanderer these inconveniences weren’t even noticeable. He was too caught up in thought, too enraptured in the sentiment that was washing over him, one he had felt so rarely he didn’t even fully understand what it was. Vince was experiencing the warm glow of coming home after time away.
He hadn’t really believed it, hadn’t let himself believe it, for the whole summer. Every ring of the phone, every l
etter in the mail, each piece of contact that arrived would certainly inform him that he and his ilk were not welcome to return. That they were being booted to make room for the real Supers. That his wonderful but brief fever dream of becoming a Hero was coming to an end.
The call never came. Still, he didn’t trust it. He was sure Melbrook would be boarded up when they arrived. He was certain that the lifts would refuse them entry into the underground area. He was positive the other Supers would band together and drive them from the subterranean halls. Today was the first time that fear had finally vanished. Strangely enough, it was only after getting his head punched about by Professor Fletcher that Vince finally felt like a true HCP student again. He was reveling in that feeling.
The others had probably gone to sleep, but Vince had been unable. That was why he was out on the campus in the dead of night, body stretched out on a bench that was too small and looking up at a universe that was too big. Were he another student, he might have been concerned for his safety. Lander was a secure place; however, there is nowhere that is truly safe to be caught unaware in the middle of the night. Vince, however, had no such concerns, and nor should he have. After all, Vince Reynolds was not a regular person.
Vince Reynolds was a Super.
* * *
Alice Adair’s leg flew through the air and locked into position, matching the figure on her television nearly perfectly. She took a step down on the extended leg then snapped out the other one. She followed this up with a series of rhythmic punches then stepped back.
Clad in yoga pants and sports bra, Alice would have looked more appropriate in an upscale gym than her actual location, her bedroom. Playing on her TV screen was a well-built man in his early forties, taking her through a set of attacks and withdraws supposedly designed to emphasize precision over power: in other words, a fighting system built on the premise of women lacking upper body strength. This man made five separate tapes, each containing a workout that lasted about an hour. Alice was on the third one so far tonight. Over the summer she’d done all five every night. For a normal person it would have been ridiculously taxing. For someone who’d been physically conditioned by Coach George for nine months, it was well within the range of doable.
Alice’s arms, always slender, were now beginning to possess a shape more distinctive than simple cylinders of pale flesh. She was gaining tone and muscle across her frame, and it was shaping her into more than the pretty teen she had once been. Alice Adair was becoming beautiful. Not just for her fitness, but for the increasing grace with which she moved and the surety with which she carried herself. It was nice; however, it was nothing more than a side-effect.
Alice had always been pretty. Alice had always known how to carry her body to send certain signals. Alice had always been dainty. Frail. Weak.
She let loose another flurry of kicks in the solitude of her room, images of last year’s fiasco sending adrenaline through her veins. All she’d done, all Alice had ever been able to do, was run away. And she hated it.
Alice stepped forward and dealt out a series of deft jabs. She wanted to be stronger. She needed to be capable. Alice Adair didn’t want to run any more.
* * *
Roy lifted another set of weights, this time focusing on his biceps. At this time of night, the gym down in the HCP was nearly deserted, only an occasional upperclassman walking by to cast a curious glance at him. Let them look; Roy couldn’t give less of a shit if he tried.
Roy pulled the weight slowly upward, coming to a rest at the top of his chest and then beginning the downward descent once more. Roy sometimes felt like his right arm made the trek easier than his left. He wondered if it was him trying to compensate, to imagine his right arm was making amends for its uselessness in the fight against George. If so, it needn’t have bothered. Roy’s body had failed as a whole that day; no one part had to bear the blame on its own. Roy had fought a variety of opponents in his life, starting well before Lander. Here the quality had increased, though. He’d seen with Chad how lacking his skills were, how much refinement he needed to play on the same field as the big boys.
His strength, however, that had never been called into question. Even against the number one ranked student in the class, it was only that Roy couldn’t make contact with him, not that the fist making the contact lacked the power to hurt. So Roy had spent the year focused on developing that skill set, on learning how to fight and knowing he was already strong enough. Until the day he wasn’t.
George had shrugged off his best attacks. All that work, all that time learning to connect, and he found himself lacking in the damage department, the one area in which he’d always been unstoppable. There was no denying the truth. He had been, at best, an inconvenience to George. If not for Vince’s help, Roy didn’t even know if he would have been that. Vince, who at the beginning of the year had been nothing more than a twig who couldn't light a cigar. Nick had done the planning. Alice had been the speed. And Mary, Mary had saved them all, despite the fact that she’d originally been the one in peril. That only left Roy, who realized he was, ever so slowly, getting passed by.
Roy set down the free weights and headed for the bench. He had to have it all. He had to fight with his brain and hit with his body. He needed to be better. He needed to be faster. He would not falter again.
And next time Roy Daniels met with George, he was determined not to need anyone’s help to knock the metal head cleanly from his shoulders.
* * *
Mary was actually asleep. She’d had quite a long day and anticipated another tomorrow, so after a light dinner and a warm shower, she’d plopped down into bed and set sail for the shores of dreamland. If only the slumber she’d found had actually been peaceful, it would have been quite a pleasant night. Sadly, such was not the case.
* * *
Nick clicked on a new link, a story containing an eyewitness account of a man made of lightning wreaking havoc in Minnesota ten years ago. It was, in all likelihood, a complete waste of time, but Nick hadn’t gotten this far without being thorough. Still, he was a bit surprised. Nick would have thought that given the showy abilities of Professor Fletcher he would have been the easiest to find information on.
That title had actually gone to Professor Pendleton, it had taken Nick less than a whole minute to find the opening segments of his fascinating story. The convict aspect was somewhat interesting, especially given his previous renown, but it wasn’t particularly useful. Someone else would raise that point in class; it didn’t need to be Nick Campbell. Besides, Nick wasn’t interested in extortion material or dirty laundry. The six folders lying on his bed weren’t filled with the family secrets of their subjects. They were stuffed with the limited data he’d managed to procure so far.
Having last names wasn’t all that helpful since they would have used different handles during their Hero days. A few of them, Professor Cole especially, had distinctive appearances. Nick managed a touch of good luck with that alone. He’d know more soon; all that was required was patience. Once he saw their powers, tracking down information would be worlds easier. And Nick intended to do just that. He wanted to know every nuance of their abilities, every weakness they might possess, even when they’d first known they were Supers. Nick wasn’t strong, or fast, or particularly intimidating. He would never be the kind of person who struck fear into the hearts of his enemies just by stepping onto a battlefield.
Nick did know, that is to say he truly understood, the value of information, however. And that merely goes to show how misplaced the fears of others were, because that trait alone made Nick Campbell one of the most dangerous men in all of the school.
9.
“Teamwork,” Professor Fletcher said, his strong voice echoing through the gym and landing upon the receptive sophomore ears. “Teamwork is our greatest advantage. Teamwork is what gives us an edge over the Supers who break the law. Teamwork can only come from trust, which can only come from not suspecting constantly that your teammates are looking to s
crew you over. That’s a gift only the good guys get. Nearly all Heroes have been, or still are, part of a team. There’s a reason for that. It’s a system that works.”
The attention of the students was well captivated by Professor Fletcher. Aside from the trouncing he’d given them the day before, he had a natural charisma that people responded to. Some of the more experienced faculty at Lander immediately recognized it as the decisiveness and confidence that came from having commanded one of the very teams he was talking about. It was the aura of leadership, and his last few years spent lounging in the sand hadn’t dulled it one bit.
“For that reason, this year you will see an emphasis on teamwork. In fact, you will be assigned to a team today and that will be your group for several events throughout the year. While you’ll attend classes as individuals, you’ll also be expected to take those skills and integrate them into the cooperative effort you’ll be building. And just so you know off the bat, this year’s final to qualify for advancement to third year will be a team event.”
There was a soft murmur of excitement amongst the students. Usually they didn’t know this much about their tests going in.
“Now since I did mention trust, normally we allow everyone to pick their own teams. We name some of the top ranks as captain then have them choose their partners one by one. Yes, we realize this leads to people picking their friends and we’re fine with that. Some captains do well with a thought out, coordinated strike team. Others choose people they can trust and depend on no matter the circumstances. I’ve seen the records and I can tell you both strategies are viable under the right circumstances. That’s what we normally do. But this year’s class isn’t exactly normal, now is it?”
There was an uncomfortable squirming from some of the students and unmasked glares from others. It seemed the collective attitude was somewhere between awkward and angry, which was still far better than Professor Fletcher had initially expected.