Inside the GTO, everything seemed out of whack. It took him a moment to realize it was his body proportions, not the car. He edged the seat forward, tilted the steering wheel down, and reached to adjust the rearview mirror before remembering it was no longer attached. He started the car and took his time driving back to the highway, accustoming himself to his new limbs and proportions. By the time he reached the road, Jake felt reasonably comfortable behind the wheel.
After a few miles, Jake started thinking seriously about his "condition." What if it wasn't reversible? That was nuts. If he'd changed once, he could change again, right? But how or why, exactly, had he changed? He'd been thinking about Jenna, totally focused on her, on being with her, and then it had happened. So maybe one of his "superpowers" was the ability to change form? They even had a name for it: shapeshifter. Though usually that meant changing into werewolves or something. In his case, he might be able to change into other people – maybe even animals? That could be pretty fucking cool. Maybe not so great for fighting aliens or rescuing people, but he could probably make some serious money out of it somehow. Anyhow, he didn’t see any big rush about changing back into his usual monument to masculinity. What a kick it would be to show up at Horner's door and watch him slobber all over himself before he learned the truth!
Another question: Had he retained his other superpowers in Jenna's body? He imagined the steering wheel heating up, and it instantly began to glow. He shut it down. He dragged out his combat knife from its sheath beneath his seat and jabbed its point into his forearm. No penetration. He smiled. Still "super."
The siren jolted him half out of seat. His side-mirror revealed a Nevada Highway Patrol cruiser a few yards off his bumper, lightbar flashing. A glance at his speedometer revealed the cause for the cop's attention: 93 miles per hour. Jake shook his head. In all his excitement he'd lost track of his speed and managed to let a highway patrol car sneak up on a road where you could see a thousand freaking miles in both directions.
Only as Jake pulled over and dug out his license, registration, and insurance did it occur to him that his situation might be...well, somewhat problematic. He didn't have much time to think about that before the trooper was tapping on his window. Jake lowered it.
"Afternoon, officer," he said.
"Afternoon, ma'am. Do you have any idea how fast you were going?"
"Not until I heard your siren. I kind of lost my train of thought."
The highway patrol cop chuckled. "Believe me, it happens out here."
Jake handed his license and papers. The cop's friendly smile wilted as the looked them over.
"Far as I can tell, miss," he drawled, "you're not Jake Culler."
Jake thought quickly. There was that "problematic" situation.
"Oh, right, sorry, officer. This is my, uh, brother's car." Jake was amazed at how innocent and sexy his voice sounded – like pure butter brushed onto sweet corn – and he could see it having an effect on the cop, who was nodding along, smiling, eager to believe. "I took his wallet instead of mine by mistake this morning."
"Where do you live?"
"Sacramento." Jake thought quickly. "I live with my brother."
The officer nodded. "Where are you headed?"
"Colorado Springs."
The cop nodded some more. "Okay. This is what I'm going to do. Let's just forget about the speeding this time. You give me your name and if it checks out okay, which I'm sure it will" – he almost winked – "then I'll print up a temporary license and a fix-it ticket. You bring in your driver's license to your nearest PD in Sacramento, have them sign off on the ticket, send that to us, and you're good to go."
Shit. Now what? Jake gave him what he hoped was his most dazzling smile, hoping to buy a few precious seconds of time. The trooper's middle-aged eyes open wider, pupils dilating, his fleshy face melting into a besotted puppy dog's.
"Jenna." Jake cleared his throat. "Jenna Wells."
"Address?"
Jake gave him his own.
"All right. Be back in a minute."
Jake watched the square-bodied officer retreat to his car. Shit, what chance did his story have? For all he knew, Jenna didn't have a driver's license, though that seemed unlikely. Her home address sure as hell wouldn't match. Jake brushed back his hair, startled by the long, thick tangles greeting his fingers. Okay, he told himself. First of all, calm the fuck down. You aren't doing anything wrong. What's the worst thing that could happen? Porky Pig could arrest him and take him in. But what a big waste of time and resources to drag a young, innocent, hotter-than-hell little lady a hundred miles to some county jail. Not fucking likely. Not that Jake had any intention of letting Porky Pig take him anywhere.
The officer strolled back, nothing in his expression or body language suggesting any problem. He handed back Jake's driver's license.
"Only thing," he said, "the address didn't check out. I take it you just moved in with your brother?"
"Yes, officer. I was in Colorado" – Jake desperately searched his memory – "in, uh, Lafayette. But me and my boyfriend..." Jake offered him a sad shrug. "It just didn't work out, you know? I needed a place to crash, so my poor, gallant brother got the call."
The officer nodded as though he'd heard it all before. "That's fine, Miss Wells. Here's your temporary driver's license. Make sure to take care of that when you get back to California."
"Yes, officer." Jake made himself bat his eyes. "I really appreciate your kindness."
"My pleasure, Miss Wells. You have a safe trip, now." He paused. "You're not going back to your boyfriend, are you?"
"Oh, no. But I do need to pick up some things from his house."
The officer tipped his hat, backing off. "Drive safe."
"You can count on it, officer."
Chapter 21
WHEN TILDIE DESCENDED FROM a troubled stormy sky onto the Shepherds' front yard, Jamie and Kylee were having a kind of séance with Kim-Ly in their living room.
"Mom!" Kylee cried, pointing out the front windows.
Jamie followed her rigid finger to the front yard, her body instantly lit up with hope that her husband had returned. Instead, a strange costumed female figure landed on the grass, the costume shredded and peppered with holes and burned cloth and blackish soot, as if she'd been through a forest fire.
"Tildie?" Jamie whispered.
She had trouble applying her usual – and necessary – discipline in rising from the couch and rushing out through the front doors. This wasn't Dennis, but it was still a damn pleasant surprise.
"Jamie," Tildie greeted her, affecting a cinematic stagger. "Thank God I'm finally here!"
Jamie wrapped her up in a gentle hug. She knew instantly that this wasn't the Tildie she'd left in Portland. The hardness in her body and strength in her arms told her that another superhuman had been born. Jamie held her at arm's length.
"You must've taken the scenic route," she said. "By way of Mount St. Helen's."
Tildie giggled. "Would you believe the United States Air Force?"
Kylee and Kim-Ly emerged and shyly shook their sooty visitor's hand when Jamie introduced her. Back inside, they took turns filling each other in on their latest adventures and mishaps – Jamie about Dennis's disappearance (they presumed he'd teleported somewhere), while Tildie described running the gauntlet of attack helicopters, military jeeps, and fighter jets – along with the pratfalls of in-flight training.
"I never realized that being a superhero could be such a dirty and stressful job," she lamented.
"We're not superheroes yet," said Kylee. "Mom is – she saved the world. We actually have to save someone first."
"Good point," said Tildie with a powder-burned smile. She glanced at Kim-Ly, who was sitting with her eyes averted. "Any luck with your psychic search for Dennis or the aliens?"
"She believes Dennis is alive." Jamie frowned. "He's just having some trouble with his teleporting skills, which I can easily understand. Nothing solid about the aliens yet...but we've k
ind of been focusing on Dennis."
"Understandable," said Tildie. She reached across the coffee table separating them and clasped Jamie's hand. "I'm still kind of selfishly bedazzled by what happened to me. I haven't even thought about the bigger picture yet."
"Me, too. I'm having trouble seeing how it's going to all add up. Kylee changed her friend, Terry Mayes, and it cured him of his bone disease just as it did on my world, but we're still waiting to see what skills, if any, he has. I'm not sure if I should be more honest with Thomas Mayes or Karen Clarkson...maybe offer them the same 'gift.' They helped us a lot in my world."
Tildie nodded. "Any word about what's happening with your other 'progeny'? Your dad? That military guy in California?"
"My dad's flying here. All he's told me so far is that he has the ability to duplicate things. Says he'll demonstrate when he gets here. I haven't heard anything from Jake Culler – the 'military guy.' I'm almost afraid to find out what happened to him."
"What I worry about is what's happening with the government super-people," said Tildie. "I have this picture of all these super-soldiers goose-stepping around ready to follow Herr Tomlinson's orders, no matter how fucked-up they are." She shot a nervous glance at Kylee, who just smiled.
"In my spare paranoid moments, I worry about them, too." Jamie found it oddly comforting that this world had Nazis to measure evil by, as disgusting as that was. "But I doubt they'll be zombies willing to obey anything President Tomlinson orders. One thing about changing so much physically is it makes you question stuff."
"But didn't you end up fighting for the government and obeying its orders?"
Jamie gave her friend a sparse smile. "Only because it ordered us to do the right thing. From what I saw, people with that kind of power are hard to control. You sort of have to convince them instead of command them."
"What if Tomlinson orders them to do the wrong thing and they obey?"
"Then we'll have to stop them."
JACOB KUSHNER had one unrelenting thought as the flu-like symptoms intensified and dragged him into the gloomiest place he'd been in since his bout with pneumonia as a child: Become the best you can be, no matter what the pain. He focused on images of him rising from the flames as the fever burned through him – rising and being reborn as a wondrous, magnificent creature. He'd always longed to be handsome, to have people regard him with helpless attraction rather than uneasy fear or distaste, as they had since childhood. He might never be handsome, but he would be powerful. That was his singular focus, even in the depth of his fever-dreams.
He imagined having super-strength, massive telekinetic powers, mysterious and compelling abilities. The nanovirus was supposed to be random in its effects, but he refused to accept that. He commanded them to give him what he wanted.
When he rose from his sick bed in an isolated hospital ward many levels beneath the surface buildings of Dugway Proving Ground, and was escorted by two beefy soldiers into the testing area, Kushner had no sense of any spectacular power. He felt surprisingly clearheaded and light on his feet, his body moving like a smoothly oiled machine, but nothing else. They'd all been asked not to attempt any exploration of their powers until they were safely within the testing area – an auditorium-sized room filled with mechanical and electrical devices, as well as weight machines and blocks of steel in various sizes.
The testing area and its furnishings had been hastily thrown together for the purpose of testing basic kinds of strength. Definitely a project in progress, Jacob thought, as he joined several scientists, many of whom were personal associates from DARPA, in the large room. They'd decided to test each person alone to avoid any of them accidentally harming the other. And the scientists themselves would withdraw to a hardened viewing room to conduct the tests.
"Good to have you back in the land of the living, Jacob," said Ken Maguire, one of his most-valued assistants in his department and probably the closest thing to a personal friend. Maguire had a material engineering degree with a specialty in exotic materials along with a doctorate in bioengineering. A perfect fit for some of their more challenging projects. "How are you feeling?"
"Good," said Kushner. "I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do."
"Aren't we all. I have to admit I'm a little envious."
Kushner gave him tight smile. "You should probably hold off on that, Ken."
"I guess we'll see soon enough. You are the first, as we all agreed. And please excuse me for not shaking your hand. I'd prefer my bones to remain intact for now."
"A sensible precaution."
"We'll withdraw to our protective cage. From there, we'll ask you to perform, or attempt to perform, a variety of tasks. Good luck, Jacob."
Kushner smiled but was all out of small talk. He regarded the machines and objects around him with a longing of a professional bodybuilder ready to get to work. Ken and the other scientists reappeared behind a long, narrow window composed of multiple sheets of plastisteel carved in the steel wall at the far side of the room. Kushner couldn't help thinking that Jamie Shepherd could probably blow that window out with a stray thought.
"Speaking of shaking hands," Ken Maguire's voice boomed through the room's loudspeakers, "let's start with something simple: a grip-strength test. It's the machine with the rod projecting from its top about ten meters at your one o'clock."
"I see it."
"Give it a good squeeze with your right and left hands. Assuming you don't destroy it with your first squeeze."
Considering the bar was composed of sheets of carbon nanotubes and titanium alloys, Kushner thought, that would be quite an accomplishment. Still, you never knew. He gripped it with his right hand, and after a deep breath, began to squeeze. A digital display lit up and started bleeding red numbers. It didn't take long for Kushner to conclude that his grip strength was vastly greater than an average man's or his own previous grip measurement of 83 PSI. The numbers flew into the thousands. He dimly remembered a chimp's grip strength being roughly six times a strong adult male human's – around 1200 PSI. If the figures were to be trusted, and he couldn't see how they couldn't, his grip strength was approaching one hundred times that!
It was happening. He was truly superhuman. It required a great effort to maintain his scientist's clinical perspective and not thrust his fists into the air and shout: "Yes!"
"About now," said Ken, "I'm feeling very happy we didn't shake hands."
They moved him to the overhead press machine. This was not a gym machine, but a plate of steel attached to a pressure-testing machine. They adjusted the height of the steel plate remotely so that Kushner's arms were about halfway extended to touch it. In his baseline test, he'd managed to apply 78 pounds of lifting force to the plate. He strained upward. Funny, it didn’t feel any different – though he could've sworn he was feeling some give in the metal itself.
The verdict: he could press 121, 187 pounds over his head.
"You're coming up as roughly 1600 times as strong so far," Ken announced. "I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that."
It was mind-blowing, Kushner acknowledged. Even in his world of ultra-advanced technology, he would've laughed off the suggestion that any conceivable near-future process could make him even ten times as strong. The body was an incredibly complex machine, and despite endless fictional depictions of super-strong vampires, androids, superheroes, and so on, changing one's cellular structure or blood or genes or incorporating servomechanisms could only take you so far.
His and his colleagues' investigation into creating super soldiers had demonstrated that vividly – and they were some of the brightest and most knowledgeable people on the planet fed by a massive black budget. Only extraordinary advances in bioengineering and/or nanodevice technology would permit the creation of a significantly stronger and less vulnerable biological soldier. Even WANDA, an android featuring their latest technology, had merely been six or seven times stronger than a normal human being. That was the best they – the best of the best – had achiev
ed so far.
No, this was not only an order of magnitude beyond anything they'd accomplished – it was far beyond anything they'd envisioned accomplishing. Perhaps several orders of magnitude. All they knew was that the alien "nanovirus" altered and augmented the human body. Full stop. It was now obvious that any further understanding would require a new theory – possibly several new theories. And not just about physics or biology, but quite probably about the nature of reality itself. It was unnerving. And exhilarating. What a great time to be a scientist...assuming the world didn't end.
Ken moved him on to telekinetics. Dr. Kushner was unable to budge even the lightest of the steel blocks they'd laid out for that testing phase, but something just as interesting did happen: Kushner found that as he concentrated on moving the block it started to dematerialize. When he shifted his focus to dissolving the block, it faded into non-existence in seconds.
The implications rocked Kushner. Now this was something. This could be an equalizer with Shepherd. He shifted his attention to the largest steel block and willed it to disappear. It started to fade instantly – but only a portion. Kushner redoubled his efforts, and the tank-sized block grew grainy, transparent, like an old television screen's last flare of pixels when it was turned off. Then there was nothing.
"Excellent," said Ken Maguire, his voice a reverent whisper. "We're not finding any traces of those blocks in the air. It appears that you didn't destroy them – rather you just made them disappear."
"Some variation of teleportation?" Kushner ventured.
"Could be. Perhaps you should try making the blocks reappear?"
Kushner devoted two full minutes to that task, but wherever the steel blocks had gone seemed beyond his reach. He shrugged and shook his head.
"No luck," he said.
"Next we're going to try flight," said Ken. "Don't jump. Based on your 12" recorded maximum stationary vertical leap, our estimates have you hitting the ceiling at over eight thousand miles per hour."
Super World Two Page 38