The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection

by Swardstrom, Will

  She said, “Please let me go.” The hiccupping catch in her voice wasn’t planned, but came unbidden. It made her feel weak.

  The back of the truck was mere steps away, the flat, raised platform of its bed looking ominous even under the bright late-morning sun. A metal box gleamed dully at the far end of it and suddenly Olisa knew how they were going to keep her from escaping.

  “Please,” she cried, her tears coming unbidden again. “Please don’t do this! Just let me go. I’ll go.”

  Ominously, the man didn’t say anything at all to this, only shifted his grip around her to heft her higher, a position more comfortable for him to lift her into the bed of the truck. But he would have to let her go when he did, even if only for a moment. All she needed was that moment.

  One touch of the ground and she could send the pulse. The Dibia would hear her cry for help and the hunters would come for her. It would be ugly and she would be in trouble with the Dibia—the first real test of her training a miserable failure—but she would be saved. She couldn’t train again, try again, unless she lived through this failure.

  The man shifted her quickly one more time and then tossed her up onto the bed of the truck. Olisa thought she was ready, prepared to leap, but the toss was stronger than she was. She had no more control than a stone she might toss across the ground would.

  Olisa rolled across the rough bed of the truck, the diamond shapes of the grating scraping the skin from her knees, her elbows and palms as she slid across the surface. Scrambling up, she tried to make the few steps to the edge and throw herself off, hoping the force of her body in flight might be enough to get her past the man and to the ground.

  Her attempt at flight was worth as much as her pleading had been, which was exactly nothing. The man used his height and long legs to step up onto the single step on the back of the truck and catch her across the chest with his outstretched arm, flinging her backward. Her back struck the bed less than a second before her head did. The stars behind her eyes returned but this time, no amount of straining on her part made them retreat.

  She felt rather than saw the man drag her across the rough surface of the truck. She heard the creak of metal hinges and then she was lifted, shifted and dropped like a fresh-caught animal into the box.

  When the lid slammed shut, the darkness was complete and her grogginess lifted as panic set in. The air became immediately close, warm, and thick. Olisa slammed her palms against the lid, but all it did was rattle against the latches. She screamed and the sounds bounced around inside the metal before returning to her ears in sharp, painful jabs.

  She pounded until the slamming of her heartbeat sped up into a flutter so fast she thought her spirit might fly out of her chest and leave her body to die. The heat inside the box built rapidly, the air going from warm and thick to hot and unsatisfying inside her heaving lungs. She quieted only when her voice took on rough edges like the Dibia’s, as if she might have aged a hundred years while inside the box.

  A tiny spot of light caught her eye, coming from the corner of the box where the seams had rusted. Olisa twisted around in the box and found her face pressed into a bundle of rags that reeked of old oil. She pawed the pile of rags away from the spot and it grew. The size of her smallest fingernail and no bigger, the air she pulled in when she pursed her lips around it felt like a fountain of cool air.

  As meager as the stream of air was, it revived her a little, cooling her overheated lungs. It calmed her some, being able to see light and knowing there was air for the taking. She focused on that tiny hole so she could concentrate on pulling in more.

  The inside of the box was sweltering, sweat already beginning to slick her palms and bead on her face. She couldn’t stay in here long or she would die from the heat. The men wouldn’t have to make a decision to kill her, she would already be dead by the time they finished talking if they talked too long. Olisa sucked in another long stream of air through the hole and thought of her Dibia’s face.

  Six

  At first, the bounce of weight on the truck bed meant nothing to Olisa. She was lost in a haze of overwhelming heat that had passed beyond sweaty discomfort some time ago. No longer able to sweat at all, Olisa’s mind kept conjuring an image of meat packed in clay and left to slowly roast over the course of a day under coals. Her thoughts had grown muggy and slow, until they circled only around the tiny hole and the light and air it provided.

  The bounces increased in frequency as more weight was added and that finally drew Olisa’s attention. A feeling of vague alarm finally overcame her flagging ability to organize her thoughts. Voices—male voices—spoke in unintelligible spurts somewhere beyond the box that made up her world. Those voices finally broke through her stupor and she had the time to form a single thought before the lid banged open. Touch the ground. Call them all.

  Light didn’t just flood the box, light invaded it. It burned Olisa’s eyes after the extended dark and sent a stabbing pain directly into her brain. Even as she slammed her blood-crusted palms against her eyes, the air—blessedly cool when compared to her box and oh, so delicious—filled her lungs and pushed away some of the steaming fog there.

  Before she could do more than suck down a few greedy gulps, rough hands grabbed her by the legs and arms, forcing her hands away from her eyes. Olisa didn’t recognize the croak that came out of her throat at the pain. For a fleeting moment, she thought there must be another girl trapped in the box with her. Then they lifted her and dropped her onto the hot metal of the truck bed.

  The pain of her elbow connecting with the metal shot up her arm and shoulder, eliciting another cry from her parched throat. As if from some vast distance, some part of her realized that the weak and scratchy sound had come from her. It sounded more like a small animal in the last throes of life, the sound of one final attempt to make its existence known to the world before it ended.

  “She must have water or she will die,” someone said.

  Olisa tried to find the source of the voice, to discern which of the faces looming above her on the bed of the truck said the words. They were said in a way that made her think there was at least one person in this group that didn’t want to see her dead. Did she have an ally, even a semblance of one?

  “If she dies, there will be trouble. Her village will not allow this,” the same voice said.

  As the faces swam into focus, Olisa realized it was the stirring man who spoke. He had been the only one to feel her presence and probably understood better than the others what she was. She couldn’t control the pants that came from her, her body’s desperate attempt to cool her overheated core, but she kept her eyes on the stirring man.

  “Go,” the lead guide said after a brief exchange with one of the hunters in their hard, sharp language.

  The stirring man tapped another of the porters on the arm and they both scrambled down from the bed of the truck, disappearing from her sight. No one spoke while they were gone. The men around her just stared, some with hard eyes and others with nervous glances, a few with shame hooding their eyes.

  The two men returned and slid four buckets onto the bed before clambering up themselves. Bright drops of water sloshed out into the air as one of the buckets slid and Olisa found her eyes riveted to the sight, following their shining path through the air until they landed on the dark, rusty surface of the truck and disappeared on the hot metal as if they had never existed.

  The stirring man said, “Sit up.”

  She did and the instant she drew her knees up toward her chest, he began to pour a thin stream of water over her head from one of the buckets. It felt frigid where it touched her head and trailed down her skin and stung like fire on the abrasions all over her. The other man dipped a cup of water from another bucket and held it to her lips as the water trickled down her face. She had never felt anything so wonderful in her life as that water in her mouth, even as she trembled in fear about what might happen next.

  The two men tended to her under the watchful eyes of the othe
rs, their four buckets emptied after a few short minutes. After the last bit was poured out, leaving Olisa to sit in a rapidly warming and disappearing pool of shallow water, the stirring man stood.

  Something in the way he stood, with his back so carefully positioned toward the others in the truck bed, made her look up. She tried to do it subtly, as if she were simply looking at all the men. As soon as her eyes met his, his brows drew together and he squinted. It was over so quickly she might have thought she imagined it, but no, it was a message. And the only message he could have for her was that he would help her.

  The stirring man turned toward the guide who had been doing all the translating and said, “She has to get out of the sun. She is too hot. She will die.”

  The guide translated and the red-haired man gave her a sharp, evaluating glance, as if he were deciding whether or not letting her die from too much heat—which he could not be blamed for—weren’t perhaps a good thing. Then his eyes traveled over all the porters and guides, witnesses he could not rely on, and he sighed. His hand made a motion as if to say, “Take her”.

  As soon as the man’s hand finished its casually dismissive arc through the air, the stirring man scooped her up, one hand under her knees and the other encircling her back. Despite them both being outside, his arms felt cool against her skin. It was that sensation more than any other that told Olisa that she was in real danger of heat stroke.

  People did die from the heat, but rarely. In Yankari, everyone knew that a bit of shade and a shallow hand-dug trench in the dirt would cool the body if no water was available. Olisa looked up at the stirring man, at the trickle of nervous sweat traveling down his temple, and realized she was truly going to die unless something happened to cool her down, and it needed to happen soon.

  He jumped to the ground, hugging her tightly to his chest to stop her from being jostled too hard, and then set off at a run toward the tents clustered at their camp. Olisa peered around his arm toward the truck and saw all the men still standing there, following their progress with their eyes. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw resignation on the faces of some of the porters, many of whom must know where she came from by her painted skirt and banded necklace.

  The stirring man ducked under the tent flap and came to a halt, his breath coming quickly from running with her weight balanced so carefully. He looked down at her, in his eyes some fear, but also pity, and said, “Do what you must.”

  It wasn’t a command, or even a statement. Those few words combined a request for mercy, fear of what might happen and some knowledge. He must have come from her village in his youth, though she didn’t know him. She could see gray in his hair now that she was closer, the dry lines around his mouth and eyes. Still, he knew what she was and was going to help her.

  At his words, something began building inside Olisa. It boiled like a cauldron set over a too-hot fire, the feelings born of terror, of knowing she was near death in her overheated state, of a desperate desire to escape. She wriggled without intending to in his arms. He took a deep breath and set her down.

  Seven

  Olisa felt the ground before her feet even touched it. It was like a pull, a tickle of charge the same as a lightning strike nearby on a stormy night. The hair on her head tried to stand on end and the cords of her neck strained as her spine straightened under the urge to stretch toward the earth. Both feet hit the ground at the same time and what happened then was nothing she could have imagined.

  A circular wall of dirt rose around her in a sharp line, rising to her hips. A bang of pulse so large it made her ears pop slammed out of her and into the ground. The reverberations were so immediate, so intense, that the conscious part of her could not perceive it properly. All she was aware of was the hot flow of pulse coming out of her and the cool relief that came back up from the ground.

  A second ripple even taller than the first spread out from her, a microsecond passing between each succeeding ripple as the circles around her expanded farther and farther. The stirring man screamed, but the sounds were distant from her, as if miles separated them instead of a mere foot. A hundred ripples had been born and moved away before the first sound traveled from his lungs to his mouth. It was as if he were moving through deep water, so very slowly. Inside her was a deep well of something, and all Olisa knew was that it needed to get out.

  Dirt fell like a veil around her, even as more filled the air. Olisa had never seen the ocean, but if she had, she would have recognized storm-tossed waves. What came out of her were the same, except instead of water, it was waves of earth spreading around her. And then, almost without volition, the call came out of her, through her feet and was thrust into the heaving earth below her.

  I am here!

  Anger began to course through her and a shiver joined the ripples, a true shaking of the ground beneath her feet. The fire ants, the ones whose nests crossed this area and whose corridors under the earth formed a busy maze, answered.

  We are here!

  Screams from outside joined the sounds of sliding earth and the crash of bouncing rocks and pebbles. A fierce creaking, the sound of metal straining against metal, soon followed. Olisa stepped out of the shaking tent, leaving the screaming stirring man with his hands rising slowly toward his ears. The ripples—no waves—now rose as far as her chin before flowing away. The epicenter of this quake of earth followed the path of her feet.

  The truck lurched to the side as she stepped out, a few of the men on its bed flying over the side and onto the ground with heavy, boneless smacks of sound. A crack was opening beneath the right wheels, a cavern opening as the crack widened.

  Out of the crack flowed a raging river of shining red carapaces. The snapping of so many jaws and the tiny patters of so many feet made a new din of noise so loud it could be heard even over the collapsing earth. The men who fell had almost no chance to flail their arms, their screams soon muffled by the blanket of shiny red insects that swarmed over them. Olisa watched as the translating guide opened his mouth to scream, only to see the widening mouth fill with a surge of gleaming red carapaces.

  Inside the truck, the red-haired man gripped the wooden slats that made up the sides of the truck, his wide eyes on her and his mouth a round black hole. The truck jerked again, the right side of it disappearing into the cavern. The never-ending stream of insects surged up and over the exposed portion of the truck. The red-haired man became a screaming red shape. Within seconds, the dull yellowish-white of bone showed through and wisps of red hair floated on the wind away from the truck.

  Only minutes after her feet touched the ground, Olisa stood in the center of her ripples alone. No human noise aside from her gasping breaths competed with the sound of sliding earth and the chittering, almost mechanical sound of the river of ants.

  While she stood there and watched the bones, then the truck, then the tents disappear into the earth, she let herself listen for the return calls. From the elephants, the lions, the baboons, the hippos—from a thousand species—the soothing answers came. They felt like an expectation met, a long-awaited answer finally arriving, and a warm welcome all at the same time.

  You are here. You are here. You are here.

  The ripples eased, rising only to her hips, then to her knees, and then only brushing her ankles. The earth around her smoothed, the dust floating in the breeze no longer made chaotic by her flying walls of dirt. Where the truck once stood, she saw only a darker stain of freshly turned earth. It was the same with the camp kitchen, the scattered gear and the tents. Aside from Olisa, only the crouching form of the stirring man remained.

  She was about to speak, to ask the stirring man to take her home to her Dibia and her village, perhaps even about to cry, when the tremors in the earth returned. This time, they weren’t from her, but were reaching out to her from elsewhere.

  From the Dibia, I am here.

  From animals she didn’t recognize in locations that seemed too fantastic to exist—a blanket of icy white, a dense forest of th
e deepest green, a land of concrete and metal and glass, a vast desert so hot the air shimmered like gold—I am here. I am here. I am here.

  And then from others, their names unimportant, the differences in their appearances superficial because under the skin they were all just like her, she received—I am here. I am here. I am here.

  Olisa let the answers wash over her like a cool night after a long, hot day. She tilted her head back and smiled into the sunlight, the heat inside her dissipating even as the ripples around her retreated once more. She might be young, but the voices from all over the world made her certain of one thing. Olisa’s world had just changed.

  Eight

  Somewhere in India — Pooja dropped the spoon she was using to stir her family’s dinner. Two steps brought her to the open doorway of her family’s small house. The stench of the open sewers that ran unhindered toward the Ganges River felt heavy in the early evening air.

  She listened, but heard no repeat of what had disturbed her. She was sure she had just heard someone call out to her. It had been like a shout that only existed right inside her ear. Then her ears had popped, just like they did when she dove beneath the surface of the river to catch a stone before it hit the muddy bottom when she played with her brother.

  She stuck her pinky into her ear and jiggled it back and forth, but the pressure was still there. Glancing back at the pot bubbling on their small, smoky stove, Pooja worried at her lip in indecision. If she left it to burn, she would be in trouble. Even worse than that, her family would go hungry. At eight years old, she was old enough to know better than to wander off when she had duties to perform.

  Before she had a chance to think twice about it, she grabbed a couple of rags and wrestled the big pot off the grate and onto the concrete blocks next to the fire. At least it wouldn’t burn there.