“And I succeeded,” she says, her head tilted back with pride.
“I’m impressed that you managed to levitate on your first try,” says Grandpa with a twinkle in his eye. “That might be as close to a natural as I’ve seen. It took Jeffrey at least a week to become stable in the air.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly stable for long…” Mae shuffles one of her shoes through the trampled grass, making a scratchy sound.
“Every little bit counts,” says Grandpa. “Any little bit of power that you have when you’re using the Vestige is a little bit more than the average person...and your enemies, though I pray there aren’t many more of those hiding in the wings.”
Suddenly I remember my notes when I was going through Dad’s journal. I have questions for Grandpa that only he can answer. I need to know more about Grandpa’s history with the Vestige. I don’t even know what powers he had, if he had any relating to mine and Mae’s. His powers could be completely different - and much more powerful. I also want to know the details about when he found the Vestige.
“What powers did you have?” I ask him, and he gives me a mischievous look, which I know I inherited from his side of the family.
“You mean what powers do I still have?” he says. Then he reaches out a hand, palm-up. “Let me see the Vestige, and I’ll show you.”
The idea of Grandpa, who is quite a bit older than anyone else I know, using super powers makes my heart stop for a moment. There’s a chill that runs through my arms and legs - a chill of anticipation. Reluctantly I remove the chain from around my neck and dangle the Vestige over Grandpa’s hand.
He closes his fingers around it and clasps the chain around his own neck.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I ask.
“Of course!” says Grandpa, waving a dismissive hand at me. “Don’t underestimate me because of my age.”
“It’s not just your age,” I argue. “The Drone nearly killed you before.”
“I didn’t have the shard at that point,” Grandpa explains. “If I wasn’t injured, I would have been able to take him myself...as long as he was on the ground.”
Mae and I watch as Grandpa takes a good five steps away from us, making a circle of empty field around him. Despite his age, he looks like he’s preparing for an olympic event. I can only hope to be as adventurous as he is when I get to be his age.
On the ground…
That meant that Grandpa couldn’t fly. I cock my head to one side as I look at him.
“What exactly is your power, then?” I ask.
“Keep a close eye on me,” he says with a knowing smile. Then he adds, “If you can.”
In the blink of an eye, Grandpa disappears into thin air.
14
Super Speed
Mae and I look around the field, but there’s nothing besides the grass blowing in the hot breeze. A few birds call out to each other in the trees. The leaves rustle to our right, flicking against each other in a natural chorus.
Still, there’s no sign of where Grandpa went.
I glance at Mae, who has replaced her frustration at me with the same startled confusion that I’m feeling.
“Where did he go?” she asks.
No sooner do the words leave her mouth when a giant whoosh sounds and Grandpa appears in front of us, not inches from my face. I’m so shocked that I lose my footing and stumble backwards, landing on my butt with an oomph.
Grandpa lets out a belly laugh, arching his back with his hands on his sides.
“You weren’t able to keep up, were you?” he asks.
Mae just stutters, motioning from Grandpa to me and back.
“You mean you were moving? Like, running at super speed?”
“Bingo,” he replies, reaching out a hand to help me to my feet. I brush off the bottom of my pants and flick bits of dry grass from my shirt. Grandpa hands me back the Vestige and goes on. “My power - the one and only - was super speed. I’m not as fast as I was way back then, but I’d say I haven’t lost the ability.”
“You were still fast enough that you were gone in the blink of an eye,” I say, my face still slacked as I look Grandpa up and down. “For a moment, I thought you teleported somewhere.”
It’s incredible that someone as old as my Grandpa could move faster than a hummingbird’s wings - and yet, he’s still the same Grandpa that I’ve always known. On the outside, at least. Inside, there are things about Grandpa that I never knew.
“If only I could teleport,” says Grandpa, getting a far off look in his eye. “What I wouldn’t give to be in two places practically at once. I can still get there unreasonably fast when I have the Vestige, but teleportation was one power I would have loved - flying, too. You’re both lucky that you have that ability. Flight wasn’t considered a given until your father wrote it that way in his series.”
“Was Dad the first person you know of who was able to fly?”
The optimism in Grandpa’s face softens into something more somber and he blinks.
“Actually, no,” he says. “Jeff wasn’t the first. Bill Flagrant was.”
My stomach feels like it’s been wrenched into a ball.
“The Drone?” I mutter.
Grandpa nods. Then he notices my look of horror and gives me a sympathetic smile.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about your father’s past,” he says. “A lot I haven’t told you. I doubt he even wrote about the majority of it in that journal you’ve got. But, for all the things he didn’t write, I have a memory. At least, I have a memory for all the things I witnessed...and heard about.”
I’m immediately interested in whatever Grandpa can tell me. We’re not on a time limit now, and there are no outsiders hurrying around like they were in the hospital a month ago. I glance at Mae, who seems just as serious about the gravity of the subject, and I swallow a lump in my throat.
“Will you tell us about some of those things?” I ask, motioning to the large stone near the trees. “I read in Dad’s journal that you found the Vestige in a cave. You never told me that detail. I have a feeling there’s a lot more that you haven’t told me.”
Grandpa presses his lips together, exhales through his nose, and nods.
“Alright,” he says, leading us over to the rock where we all take a seat, getting as comfortable as we can. “Now’s as good a time as any to tell you some of the things that happened. They’re not very pretty, but you can’t change history. It is what it is.”
I lean back against an outcrop of the rock with my hands behind my head.
“Even from Dad’s journal, I can tell that some of his childhood was pretty sad.”
“Mostly because of what happened to Bill,” says Grandpa. “I suppose I should just get right into it. I never intended for your father to get a hold of the Vestige. I feel like things would have been easier for those two if they had never used it.”
“Never?” says Mae, watching Grandpa intently.
He shakes his head.
“I thought it was much too dangerous, especially for a high schooler. Your father had a really tough time with puberty, and what’s the point of adding one more layer of change to that time of his life? Especially when there was no knowing what sort of Aberrant abilities he would end up developing.
“But, Jeff was the kind of son who couldn’t keep out of trouble. He was always poking around, digging through boxes of junk in search of odds and ends that could be repurposed as experimental machines. Imagine him as a tinkerer and you’d be pretty spot on. He was always building gadgets with Bill. They were the outcasts in school, you see. So, they found a place to belong in shop class.”
Grandpa let out a laugh.
“I remember one time your grandmother kept badgering Jeff because he wouldn’t fold his laundry. It was always piled up in the corners of his room. Well, one weekend he shut himself in the garage with Bill and the two of them invented a folding contraption that would fold all of his laundry for him.”
“Did it
work?” I ask, with a smile.
“More or less,” Grandpa replies. “It was nothing professional, despite their best intentions. Eventually the thing stopped working and had to be scrapped. Those two were always getting into things. Sometimes things that they shouldn’t.”
Grandpa looks me in the eye as he says this, and I know that he’s referring to the Vestige. He continues his story.
“I found the Vestige, like I said, while I was working a logging job. I was on my lunch break, and like most of the guys, I took that hour to explore some of the mountains by Sebago Lake. It’s a beautiful place. Well, it was a particularly sunny day and I was looking up at the sky through the trees as I hiked with my lunchbox in tow, and suddenly there was this flash. It nearly blinded me. I stumbled back against a tree, rubbing my eyes to get them back to normal. When I opened them, I saw something shiny on the ground in front of me.
“When I stepped forward to pick it up, the ground beneath my feet collapsed and I tumbled into a hole with loose dirt crumbling all around me. I think I fell maybe seven or eight feet and ended up in some sort of cave. The shiny object I spotted also fell down with me, and I picked it up. It was the Vestige.”
Mae and I both listened intently. The story sounds like something out of Indiana Jones. I had no idea that Grandpa’s life was full of so much adventure and mystery, almost like my own at this point.
“How did you get out?” I ask.
“Easy,” Grandpa replies. “I followed the cave tunnels until they came out of the side of the hill. I think they turned the place into some sort of national park with trails and all that. But, at that point, I don’t think anyone but me knew it was there. Anyway, I thought that the medallion could be worth some money, so I pocketed it and put it away at home. The powers came later on when I traveled with the Vestige in my pocket, going to a bunch of different pawn shops. Of course, when I realized that I had super speed when holding the Vestige, I didn’t want anyone to know about it. So, I put it away in a box for safe keeping.”
He closes his eyes for a moment, remembering something that seems painful to him.
“I didn’t know that your father found the Vestige. It was buried in a box of old things that I’d forgotten. Of course, it wasn’t just thrown into the box. It was kept in an old cardboard box for drill bits, and must have been at the very bottom of the pile. I guess I hoped that nobody would find it mixed in with odds and ends.”
“Why didn’t you get rid of it?” I interrupt, immediately feeling stupid for asking. I try to clarify. “I mean, obviously the Vestige is amazing, but if you were afraid that someone else might find it and use it, why not bury it in the yard somewhere, or throw it into the lake?”
“If I had thrown it in the lake, someone else might have found it,” Grandpa answers. “Someone outside the family. I knew what sort of power the Vestige contained at that point. Could you imagine someone else getting their hands on it - someone nefarious?”
I nod.
“Now I can, after my fight with The Drone.”
Grandpa grimaces.
“If there’s one thing I want you two to understand, it’s that those tiny pieces of medallion are not just a toy. They’re powerful, and being able to harness that power is a privilege. You two have a good sense of right and wrong, but what about someone who just wants revenge? Or to cause pain?” He shudders. “Too many wars have been fought because a group of people wanted to exterminate one another. Now, I knew that I had super speed. That’s how I was able to get done so many things in my younger years - unbeknownst to your grandmother. But, if someone else got their hands on the Vestige and also developed powers, they might find themselves possessing an ability that could destroy human life. Take your pulse blasts, for instance.”
He nods at me.
“If you didn’t care, you could use those powers to physically destroy a person’s body. Back when I hid the Vestige, I thought that if it was up in our attic that it would be safe from the world. Obviously, fate had other ideas.
“Like I said, your father found the Vestige and tried to use it as a part of one of his projects - I can’t remember what. But, somewhere along the way he realized that it gave him superhuman abilities. The first one was pulse blasts, just like Shaun. I think he told me that his first couple blasts managed to destroy whatever project he was working on. He originally thought that his contraptions were malfunctioning, but it was Bill who told him that it wasn’t possible. There was just too much energy to be explained by a mechanical malfunction, and after studying a third blast from Jeff’s hands, Bill pinpointed the source of the power.”
“Didn’t Dad feel the blasts coming out of his skin?” I ask, remembering my first time doing a pulse blast. My hands ached afterwards.
“I’m sure Jeff felt them,” Grandpa explains. “But, he was probably in denial. Realizing that you have superpowers is something that people react to differently. It can be exciting, but it can also be terrifying when you realize how much power you have at your fingertips - in Jeff’s case, literally.”
This is all really interesting to me, but I want to cut to the good stuff. I need to know the reasoning behind Dad and Bill’s big split. If they were such good friends, why did they all of a sudden stop being buddies, with Dad going on to be a hero and Bill becoming a super villain?
“So, what tore the two of them apart?” I ask. “Dad and Bill?”
Grandpa gets a reverential look on his face as he remembers.
“It was their abilities that did them both in,” he says. “As you know, back then there was only a single, solid Vestige. Jeff is the one who found it, but like any good friend, your father let Bill try it out. Bill practically begged him to try it. They were both nerds, of course, so superpowers were a huge deal - as they would be to anyone. But, for the two of them, this was life-changing. Bill figured out how to fly first. It must have been terrifying. Even so, the two of them were flying all over the place in no time. One of the perks of living in Pine Grove is that there are plenty of areas to practice superpowers without being spotted.
“With only one Vestige, the two had to take turns. You can imagine that this was a source of contention between the two of them as they went along. Jeff started to take longer flights, and Bill got restless.” Grandpa licks his lips. “The two of them were outcasts because of their interests, but Jeff had ambitions to fit into the mainstream at school. His new powers made him an Aberrant - a term he came up with to describe his superhuman self - and it also gave him more confidence. He started to get more daring and ended up asking your mother out.” He glances at me with a knowing smile. “She said yes, of course.”
I catch a glimpse of Mae watching me. When she sees that I notice her staring, she looks away.
“Bill saw the confidence that your father had,” Grandpa goes on, “and decided that he wanted that sort of confidence, too. One night he asked to borrow the Vestige, but Jeff refused. Your father knew that Bill wanted to ask out a girl, and he was afraid that Bill would reveal his powers in a bid to win the girl over. The powers were supposed to be a secret between the two of them, so there was no way that Jeff would let that information slip to an outsider. No matter how much Bill asked, Jeff always refused. He didn’t want to the Vestige to be taken lightly any more. So, when Jeff wasn’t looking, Bill stole the Vestige.
“He wasn’t content with just using it, however. He wanted to own it, but knew that Jeff would never give it up. So, he snuck into the shop classroom and broke the medallion into two pieces.”
I reach beneath my collar and press the Vestige between my fingers. The sharp edges where the shard was broken off now take on a new meaning to me. They’re not just a damaged piece of metal. They represent a war between my father and The Drone.
“So, that’s when Bill became The Drone,” I say.
“Yes,” Grandpa replies.
“So, when did you realize that they had the Vestige?” asks Mae, resting her elbow on the rock.
“I became inv
olved when Jeff found out what Bill had done. He came looking for me - for my help. He didn’t know that I had powers of my own that were lying dormant for years. I tried to help put things back…” Grandpa’s eyes started to water. “But, some things can never be put back.”
A breeze whipped through the field, rippling the tall grass around us. None of us spoke for a few moments. It didn’t seem right to speak with Grandpa reliving something so painful. After a few moments he finished up his story.
“The girl was dead when we got there,” he said. “Bill had asked her out, but she declined. I don’t know the details of what took place, but I do know that Bill killed the girl in a fit of rage. The girl’s body was battered by what could only have been pulse blasts. The official report said that he did it using a board from a nearby abandoned house.”
“How did you find out that he did it?” I asked.
“He admitted to it,” said Grandpa. “His guilt took over, however briefly. But, even with the guilt, he still intended to kill again. His rage was too much for him to handle. I managed to stop him with the help of your father. Together we took Bill down and turned him in. His own parents wouldn’t have done that. It was for his own good, and the safety of our town, and the world.
“Jeff and I both decided then and there that it wasn’t safe to keep the Vestige in one piece any more. He had wanted to put it back together, but instead your father kept the main part of the medallion while I kept the shard. It was hidden in the wall until you brought it out a month ago.”
The story was incredible. I couldn’t process everything fast enough. If only I had thought to record the story with my phone…
Then again, it was probably best that the story remained undocumented in a traditional sense. If someone were to get a hold of Grandpa’s story they might hunt for the Vestige, which is the last thing I want.
Living in this new era of secrecy is taking some getting used to. It seems that everything I learn now is privileged information. Keeping my lips shut is going to be a useful skill. Even so, I’m starting to get ideas for my Super Guy script just listening to this history. Nobody says I can’t fictionalize what took place in the past.
The Aberrant Series (Book 2): Super Vision Page 7