They had been working on a stimulant for the respiration system, a sort of steroid that would allow the lungs to become strong enough to resist the asthma. Alan hadn’t been stupid enough to try the stimulant on himself. It was a simple mistake. He had been about to put a sample in storage when it slipped from his fingers. The vial shattered on the desk, the contents forming a noxious blue cloud.
Alan thought he would die that night. He hadn’t been able to breathe for what felt like several minutes. His heart beat so fast he thought it would burst from his chest. He lay on his knees, suffocating and seemingly having a heart attack at the same time. He finally, mercifully, passed out.
When he woke up, he stared at the floor of the lab, unable to believe he was still alive. His breathing had returned to normal, as had his heart rate. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought it all to be a dream.
There was a knock on the door. Alan got up to answer it. That was when it happened. He crossed the room in a microsecond. It happened so fast he could only blink in surprise. Had he really just gone ten feet in the blink of an eye?
Someone knocked on the door again. Alan reached up for the knob, his hand working so fast he didn’t see it. When he pulled the door open, he stumbled and hit the floor again.
As he lay there, he saw Sally Perkins, his future wife. She was eighteen years old then, a stunning little blond girl who could have been captain of the cheerleading squad if she hadn’t been more interested in science. She smiled down on him. “Hi. I didn’t realize you were still working in here.”
“Oh, I’m always working,” Alan said. He took the hand she offered, grateful to let her do the work of pulling him up as he couldn’t trust his own body at the moment.
“Have a little accident?” she asked, gesturing to the broken glass.
“You could say that.”
“Are you all right?” She put a hand to his forehead. “You’re a little warm.”
“I’m fine…just fine,” he said. In midsentence the realization hit him that just yesterday if a girl like Sally had talked to him, he would have needed his inhaler after two seconds. But now his breathing continued nice and steady, just like a normal person. The compound worked!
It did come with a side effect, though. He could now move faster than anyone on Earth. In a deserted parking lot he clocked himself. He could go from zero to sixty miles an hour in a millionth the time of the most powerful sports car.
In that same parking lot he found out he would need some new footwear. After his first test, his pair of sneakers had become a charred mess while his feet had second-degree burns. The burns healed by the next morning. Another side effect of the accident was that many of his body’s functions had sped up. When he deliberately pricked a finger with a needle, he watched in amazement as the blood stopped in a second and the hole disappeared another second later.
He spent days locked up in the lab to run tests on himself. What he saw in the slides was unbelievable. If he didn’t know better, he would think it impossible. His biochemistry had become…superhuman.
But the idea to become an actual superhero didn’t come until his first date with Sally. They were walking home from the movies when someone yanked Sally’s purse off her shoulder. “My purse!” she shouted.
“I’ll get it,” Alan promised as the purse-snatcher ran down a side street. Alan took off and soon found himself actually passing the snatcher. He came to a stop just in time to punch the snatcher in the throat. While the crook wheezed on the ground, Alan took back the purse. Then, looking down at his charred shoes and bright red feet, he took the snatcher’s shoes. “Serves you right,” he mumbled.
Thus was Velocity Man born. Though first Alan had needed to create the friction-resistant polymers so he wouldn’t need a new costume each time he sped up. That had taken weeks of trial and error, during which time he hardly saw Sally. He had nearly lost her then—
She’d be lost for sure unless Allison got moving. She thought again of those early days. There hadn’t been any trick to it; she had just done it. That’s what she has to do this time. Don’t worry that her feet are smaller and clad in ridiculous shoes. Her feet are still her feet; they’ll know what to do. All she has to do is trust them. It’s like a cartoon character walking over a cliff; you just have to not look down.
“Here we go,” she mumbles. And then she’s off. Her feet hit the surface of the water, but they keep moving. Loose hair whips into her eyes. She brushes it aside to find herself in the middle of the ocean. She plunges on.
***
It takes her five minutes to reach Focal City. She chides herself for being so slow; it should have taken half that time to get here. She chalks it up to her new body, these heels, and this damned hair getting in her face. Would it have killed them to give her a piece of ribbon or something to tie it back with?
She stops alongside a shipping container on the docks to survey the situation. A crane a short distance away is frozen with another shipping container suspended a few feet beneath it. The driver is motionless at his controls. She sees more dockworkers standing rigid like statues.
Inertia’s frozen the whole city, no doubt. She’s done it before, a device of her own manufacture creating a quantum field that causes all time to stop. Allison is only able to move through it by accelerating her molecules enough to resist the effects.
She hurries through a city that looks like a life-size diorama. In the park she finds someone poised in midair as he goes to spike a volleyball. It’s tempting to put the man down on the ground so he doesn’t hurt himself when things speed back up, but she doesn’t have time to do that for everyone. She’ll have to hope for the best.
While she searches for Inertia, she makes a stop in a department store. In the hair care section she finds a pack of elastic bands and takes one out. With this she’s able to pull back her hair into a ponytail. She remembers doing this for Jenny once her hair got long enough to need it; she never thought she’d need to do it to herself.
With that problem solved, she continues her search. She has no idea what Inertia might have come here for: money, priceless works of art, or maybe even to kidnap someone. She’s tried all those plans before and been foiled each time. After a while you’d think she would learn, but Inertia’s always been a slow learner.
She gets her first clue when she sees a pair of F-22 fighters suspended in the air, probably a couple of Dalton’s “assets” sent to deal with the situation. One has its bomb bay open, an air-to-ground missile poised to streak away from it. To where? She traces the path with her eyes.
“Oh no,” she whispers a moment before a blue glass skyscraper explodes. Allison charges forward to move any bystanders away from the blast zone. That the explosion is going at normal speed means Inertia must be using a special kind of bomb.
As Allison pushes a woman with a stroller back to a safe area, she realizes she’s going to get a chance to find out what Inertia’s up to. The woman is rounding a corner of a nearby building, her pink-and-purple suit making her stand out even more than being the only one besides Allison moving at normal speed.
Inertia doesn’t have nearly the speed of Allison even in her new body with these stupid heels. Allison catches up to her after half a block. She throws Inertia into the revolving door of an office building. As Inertia is trying to recover, Allison speeds over to grab her by a boot.
She drags the villain out onto the sidewalk. Inertia grins up at her. “Well, what do we have here? You Speedy’s new girlfriend?”
“Something like that,” Allison says. “What are you doing here?”
“Just having a little fun.”
“Fun? There were hundreds of people in that building!” Allison can’t tell Inertia those people were her friends and colleagues from T.U.R.B.O. Labs. Instead, she kicks Inertia in the ribs with one spike-toed boot. “What were you after?”
When Inertia doesn’t answer, Allison kicks her again and again, thinking of all the good people who are now most like
ly gone. Her vision blurs as tears bubble up in her eyes. “Why?” she shrieks.
Finally Inertia says, “They said he was dead!”
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend. They said he was dead.”
“Why the labs? What was there you wanted to destroy?”
“I knew he worked with them. I figured if I took it out, it’d draw him out.” Inertia grins again. “I guess I got something even better.”
“Shut up!”
Allison rains down a flurry of furious punches at superspeed. Inertia’s nose snaps, blood dripping from it. She’ll probably have a black eye tomorrow morning too. Even that’s too good for her. “You monster! You did all this just to draw me out?” When she sees Inertia’s eyes widen, Allison realizes her mistake. “I mean—”
“Holy shit! You’re him?” Her grin widens to expose a couple of broken teeth. “You really got cute, didn’t you?”
“Shut up!” Allison shouts again.
“Wait until I Tweet this—”
Allison hefts Inertia to her feet. Allison realizes she’s an inch or two shorter than Inertia now even with the heels. She’s still tall enough to look Inertia in the eye. “You aren’t going to get a chance to Tweet anything. I’ll make sure they put you in the deepest hole they can find.”
She drags Inertia over to the nearest police officer. Allison takes the man’s cuffs to snap around Inertia’s wrists. Then she leaves Inertia in the back of the officer’s cruiser. She doesn’t plan to keep her there; she needs to check something first.
***
Allison races up fifteen blocks, to her old building. Like the rest of the city, everyone’s frozen in place. Her neighbor, Mrs. Hernandez, has a spoonful of tomato soup poised in front of her lips. The soup is still warm.
Allison bursts into her apartment. “Sally?” she calls out before she remembers Sally can’t hear her if she’s frozen and even if she did, she wouldn’t recognize the voice.
She doesn’t find Sally in the living room, kitchen, or dining room. There’s no sign of Jenny either. Please, tell me they didn’t decide to visit the lab today, she thinks.
She drops to her knees in the bathroom doorway. A sigh of relief escapes her lips. Sally is poised over the tub, one hand in Jenny’s hair as she rubs shampoo in. From the chocolate staining her lips yet, Jenny must have made a mess of her lunch and Sally had decided to give her a bath.
Allison gets slowly to her feet. She grips the wall with one hand as her stomach continues to flutter even though the danger has passed. Will Sally be able to remember anything about this later? Will Jenny? She doubts it.
She squats down to put an arm around Sally. “I love you.” She kisses her wife’s damp lips. They’re still warm but Allison feels like she’s kissing a corpse. She turns to put a hand on her daughter’s wet hair. “Daddy’s going to be home real soon, angel,” she whispers.
Then she’s gone.
Chapter 11
Starla needs to get a running start before she can launch herself into the air. She has the same difficulty as Allison thanks to the spike heeled boots they gave her. She doesn’t know why anyone would make footwear this impractical. For that matter why did they make her skirt so short and cut out half the top part of her costume? If Ma saw her like this, she’d faint dead away from the sight and not just because the son she’d raised had become a daughter.
If Stan had brought over a girl who looked like this to the farm, Pa would have tanned his hide—verbally at least since by the time he was fourteen it was impossible for Pa to hurt him physically. It had happened when Stan brought over Lucy Chesnutt, the hottest girl in middle school. Stan had been excited to land such a catch and thought his parents would agree. Pa had taken him outside and said, “A girl like that is nothing but trouble. She’s only good for one thing and once she’s used up from that she’ll be nothing more than a husk.” Pa had held up an ear of corn to demonstrate. He’d peeled it to leave Stan with the husk.
That’s what his parents would think now if they saw Starla. They’d call her a hussy, a tart, and possibly worse. She wipes tears from her eyes and curses herself. That’s not important right now. There are lives at stake. Even if she has to go stark naked, she has to save them.
She concentrates on getting one foot in front of the other. As she reaches the end of the pier, she launches into the air. There’s a microsecond where she isn’t sure if she’ll make it or not and then she finds herself hundreds of feet over the base. It’s located on a nondescript island in the Pacific. Close to Indonesia, she would guess. She memorizes the location for when she has to come back. When she does, she plans to have a little chat with Major Dalton not just about the costume, but about the island’s existence in general. Secret government facilities are not something she approves of.
Starla gets into the jet stream to help carry her across the ocean and then across North America to Atomic City. The sea and then the land beneath her look so calm. From up here, and especially in space, it seems impossible for the world to be riddled with so much evil. She always thinks that’s how God must see it.
The skyscrapers for Atomic City come into view from almost a hundred miles away. There are so many that are so tall it seems like they should sink the island beneath their combined weight. The main island probably isn’t much bigger than that housing the secret facility in the Pacific, but it’s much more populated. There are over ten million people there, most of them good, hard-working souls who only want to go about their lives without interruption.
But an interruption is what they’re getting. It comes in the form of a black teardrop-shaped craft. There’s a swarm of smaller objects surrounding it while a beam of green light from the main craft tears into Fermi Square to lop off the head of a statue of the inventor.
Starla’s infrared vision kicks in on its own, allowing her to see hundreds of thousands of tiny heat signatures descending upon the city from the main craft, which has only one occupant. That has to be Rad Geiger, the disgruntled nuclear scientist who had sworn revenge on the city, especially Apex Man, for thwarting Geiger’s scheme to irradiate the entire population of Atomic City. Geiger believed that through radioactivity, human evolution could advance to some “perfect” design.
He continues to believe this despite that every scientific authority on the planet has told him radiation is deadly to humans. As Starla gets closer, she notes the tiny heat signatures are much too hot to be anything natural. She has to shake her head in order to get the IR vision to stop. With her regular eyes she sees the smaller objects are bees. Irradiated killer bees, she’s willing to bet given Geiger’s m.o.
The question is what can she do about them? There’s no way she can grab all those bees to cart them away. The only viable solution is to use her flame breath to incinerate them. She hates to kill any living creature, but these deadly bees are already an environmental disaster in the works.
As she descends through the clouds, a tress of hair flaps into her face, momentarily blinding her. By the time she swats it away, she’s already in the midst of a swarm of bees. Most of them key in on her; it probably helps most of her costume is bright yellow like a bee.
She leads the swarm over the harbor. It’s easy enough for her to outrun them, so she has to go slow to make sure they can keep up. Once she judges she’s out far enough, she unleashes the torrent of flame she’s been holding in for more than a week. A shorter belch of smoke follows this.
For a moment she hovers limp in the air, glad to finally be rid of that heat. Then her super hearing picks up screams from Fermi Square. She still has a job to do.
***
The bees have descended upon the tourists and businesspeople who usually inhabit the square in the middle of the day. Starla wastes no time to drop into the square. Again hair whips into her face, so that her graceful landing turns into a comical plunge that ends with her somersaulting across half the plaza until she smacks into the base of the Fermi statue.
Someone touches her
. She hears the familiar voice of Billy Leyton, the freelance photographer who has often worked for Stan Shaw’s newspaper. “Are you all right, miss?” he asks in his chipper voice.
She sweeps hair away from her face and smiles. “I’m fine. But you won’t be if you don’t get out of here.”
When she gets to her feet, he gapes at her in awe. “Wow,” is all he can manage to get out. Only after a moment of staring does he remember the camera around his neck. “Can I get a picture?”
“Maybe later. I’m a little busy right now.”
“Sure thing, miss.”
She shoves Billy back as gently as she can as more of the bees head her way. She hopes she can control her fire breath well enough in the confined space of the square so she doesn’t burn everything up. With her eyes closed to focus, she lets loose another stream of flame. This one is small enough to vaporize a cloud of bees while not turning the civilians in the square to puddles of goo.
“Holy cow!” Billy shouts. She hears him snap his camera time and again. She should probably grab the camera, but there’s no time. In this day and age everyone with a cell phone probably already has her picture so it won’t do much good.
The bees seem to prefer her to normal people. Allison or Rob could probably give her a scientific explanation, but she figures her alien body must look tastier to them. As each group of bees comes at her, she leads them into the air to harmlessly vaporize them. Before long there are only a few left.
The stragglers are more difficult as she has to hunt them down to swat them with her hands. One of these tries to sting her left hand, but it can’t get through her skin. That at least kills the thing on its own.
Once she’s cleaned up the square, she heads up into the air. Geiger’s ship has already begun to head east, out towards international waters. She doesn’t plan to let him get that far.
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