by Jeremy Scott
With Mr. Charles throwing down his own NPZ, though—over both the school’s massive yard where I was facing off with my own grandfather and the school itself—the two guards had come under an NPZ.
“What just happened?” the fat one asked the skinny one.
“What do you mean?”
“My powers are gone.”
“What?!”
“My powers … they’re gone.”
Both men wheeled and looked at the prisoners, none of whom were escaping.
“There appears to still be an NPZ over the prisoners.”
“Well, it must be coming from the big man, because it’s not mine.”
The skinny one looked worried. “Wouldn’t he tell us if he didn’t need us down here anymore?”
“You want to go ask him, feel free. I’m content to just sit here and play babysitter to these do-gooders here. No sense joining a fight when I have a perfectly good safe-zone seat right here.” He plopped his butt down on the folding chair again and crossed his legs.
The skinny one nervously reminded his buddy, “This ain’t no safe zone, Harry. You forgetting what’s down the hall there?”
“Oh yeah,” the big one chuckled. “Well, that’s still a ways off. For now, I’m not going anywhere. I’ve seen what he does to people who disobey.”
Bentley, Freddie, James, and Patrick watched from around the corner at the end of the hall. Most of the lights were off downstairs except in the detention area itself, where the prisoners were being held.
“Okay, guys,” Bentley whispered. “Looks like Phillip’s plan worked. There’s an NPZ over the whole school now, and now we have to get these two idiots out of the picture. Remember … no powers. Just four kids against two adults … we ought to be able to handle that, right?” He grinned, and the others returned the smile.
They crept back away from the corner and into the nearest classroom so they could plan their assault on the prison guards. But as soon as they were inside, they stopped dead in their tracks.
“What is that?” Patrick asked nervously, referring to the giant foreign object in the center of the classroom.
“Um,” Bentley replied, still processing.
“Is that what I think it is?” Freddie said. “I mean … is that a … a …”
“Bomb?” Bentley offered.
“Bomb?” Patrick asked, hoping he’d heard wrong but knowing he had not.
“Um … yeah,” Bentley said, sizing up the coffin-sized device in the center of the room. “I definitely think … that this is a bomb.”
“Like … a bomb-bomb?” James asked politely.
Bentley bent down and looked at the control panel of the bomb. “Yes, James. It’s a bomb.”
“Holy crap, guys, we gotta get out of here,” Patrick suggested urgently. “We gotta go!”
“Calm down, calm down,” Bentley said, dismissing my brother’s worries. “It’s not on a timer or anything. It’s not counting down. It looks like there’s a remote switch back here,” he said, pointing, though doing so from a good foot away. “I think it’s just dormant for now.”
“You do realize, don’t you,” Patrick said, in his patented sarcastic tone, “that your assessment doesn’t make me feel any safer, right?”
“Is it … you know, nuclear?” James asked, wanting to gather as much information as possible before freaking out.
“How should I know?” Bentley countered, giving no comfort whatsoever to the other two.
“Aren’t you, like, the gadget wizard?” It was Freddie chiming in.
“Gadgets? Yes. Explosives? Nuclear warheads?!” Bentley shrugged. “I mean, this casing is pretty solid, so there’s no real way to tell what’s inside there.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” said James.
“Probably safe to assume the worst, I guess, given this guy’s track record.” Bentley seemed concerned, but not panicked. “Look, guys, if we don’t get those prisoners out, a bomb may be the last of our worries, okay? Now, if it said two minutes on it, and it was counting down, then yeah … I’d say we get the hell out of here. But it’s not. And we have a job to do. Don’t you wanna save your dad?”
“Yeah,” Patrick agreed. “Definitely.”
“Okay then, let’s just pretend this thing isn’t here and figure out how to take care of those two guards.”
“Don’t you think we ought to warn Phillip?” James wondered. “About the bomb, I mean?”
Bentley shook his head. “No. We have to maintain radio silence, that’s the plan. Finch might have equipment or abilities that could pick up our transmission, and for now, at least, he thinks we’ve been captured. The bomb doesn’t matter unless everything else goes right. Otherwise, it’s just a bomb that goes off after we’re already dead. This must be his endgame, though,” Bentley added, mostly to himself, “to blow everything up.”
“Then …” Patrick asked timidly, “tell me again why we aren’t panicking?”
Bentley turned and looked at my brother with a smile. “Because it isn’t the end yet.” He put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “Which means we’ve still got time to stop it.”
***
“Jesus, Thomas, was that your plan?” said a tired-sounding Mr. Charles. “Force the prophecy to come true by manipulating this boy’s life?”
“The prophecy doesn’t say anything at all about how things come about … just that they come about,” Thomas-slash-Finch argued. “‘He shall return again, an outcast, one who is not like us, who does not see the world as we do.’ Now tell me, Luther … how does that not describe our little friend here?”
“He’s not a little friend, Thomas, he’s your grandson. He’s your flesh and blood!”
“All the more reason I should want him on my side,” he continued. “‘This one shall not know of his own true depth of power until he suffers great loss and injury, and he alone stands as the last protector between the world and a great evil. Only then shall he truly see. Only then shall he embrace his true purpose.’” He spread his arms out wide, like he was preaching the gospel. “It’s all come true now. It’s all happened, and here we are, the great evil,” he gestured toward himself, “and the last protector,” he gestured at me. “All that’s left is for him to embrace his true purpose.”
“He already has, Thomas, by simply showing up here. Unlike you, this boy has courage.”
Finch’s eyes flared, and he seethed as he barked back at Mr. Charles, “I had courage once, too, Luther! All my life I did the right thing … the good thing. I was the ultimate hero, Luther! Do you remember that?!”
For the first time, Mr. Charles seemed to lose confidence a bit, and his head lowered to the ground.
Finch just kept right on with his verbal offensive. “And do you remember how I lost my courage, old friend?”
The frail old man, eyes still facing downward, merely nodded.
“That’s right,” Finch gloated, almost giddily, despite the fact that we now had the upper hand. “I was betrayed by someone I trusted, handed over into tragedy by my best friend.”
***
Bentley, James, Freddie, and Patrick hid in a classroom just down the hall from the prisoners and Finch’s guards. The gang had moved the teacher’s desk to a new position behind the door. The classroom door opened inward, and the desk now stood behind the door.
For a few moments, Bentley had pondered the best way to move the desk without making a sound and alerting the guards. While he was doing that, James just touched the desk and teleported it to the new location.
“Oh,” Bentley said. “Right. Very good.”
One by one, they each climbed up on the desk.
Patrick looked over at the bomb in the center of the room, trying to find a way to put it out of his mind.
“Are you sure this is the best idea?” Patrick asked, relatively new to crime-fighting and definitely new to the genius of Bentley Crittendon.
“Look, this was the plan all along, Patrick: put the guards on
a level playing field with us with the no power zone, and then we take them out old-school style.”
“It feels more like Scooby-Doo style,” Patrick said, picking up the sarcasm responsibilities in Henry’s absence.
“Well, if you have a better idea …” Bentley said, knowing full well that Patrick did not have a better idea. You would have thought Bentley had dealt with little brothers before, though he had not.
Still, Patrick took a moment to think, only to come up empty. “No, I don’t,” he said dejectedly.
“Okay, then. James, you ready?”
“Ready, indeed!” he chirped.
“Freddie?”
Freddie held out a thumbs-up.
“Patrick?”
Patrick rolled his eyes but agreed anyway. “I guess.”
“Okay then, guys … here we go.” Bentley grabbed two large books off the surface of the desk at his feet and hurled them across the room. One of them smacked hard into the bookshelf next to the window while the other one found the window itself. The concussive impact of the books and the unmistakable sound of shattering glass echoed down the hallway outside the classroom.
“Well, that ought to do it,” Bentley whispered, startled by the level of noise he’d managed to create.
I imagine the fat guard and the skinny guard bickered for a moment about whether they should go check out the strange noise, finally deciding to do it together after realizing their prisoners were still captive, whether they stayed or not.
Bentley held a finger to his mouth as the four boys heard the guards slowly shuffling down the hallway.
James and Patrick had raided the room’s potted-plant collection on Bentley’s instructions, and each kid stood silently, holding a large ceramic pot high above their heads. They looked like wound-up little human rubber band guns, cocked and loaded, ready to spring into action. They just needed a target. Patrick helped get James aimed in the right direction while Bentley held a slightly smaller plant up over his own head.
And about a minute after Bentley tossed the books, two targets appeared, exactly where Bentley had said they would: in the classroom doorway, on the opposite side of the door from the four hiding kids.
Bentley looked at the two men through the frosted glass of the door’s window and found they were definitely larger up close than they’d appeared from far away. Bentley shouted, “Do it!”
***
“Imagine how easy your misunderstanding would have been to avoid.” My grandfather was lecturing his old partner, twisting the knife. “When Artimus knocked me off that roof, it might have been prudent for someone to go and check to make sure I was actually dead, don’t you think? ”
“No one ever survived a direct hit from Artimus like that, Thomas, and you know it. There was no reason to doubt.”
“Right,” he spat back at Mr. Charles. “Because you and Artimus had a pact, right? Tell me, Luther,” Finch droned on, “do you feel bad? Do you … have any remorse about what you did to me?”
Mr. Charles said nothing and continued looking down at the grass. A lifetime of shame, regret, and self-loathing was bubbling to the surface, and the man couldn’t even bear to look his former friend in the eye. I didn’t blame him.
“Luther!” Finch’s voice rumbled, louder than I’d ever heard it. “Tell me, friend …” The word was layered with a poisonous tone. “Are you sorry?!”
“I was,” Luther responded, with a surprising amount of conviction. “For almost fifty years I was sorry, Thomas. I’ve devoted my life to self-loathing since betraying you. But now that I see what you’ve become—what you truly were all along …” he paused, swallowing. “Well, I wish I’d pushed you off that roof myself.”
Finch smiled, as though he’d just earned a trophy he’d been chasing for years. “You know, I’ve been warming myself for years on the hope that you had a festering wound of guilt for turning on me.”
“You were changing,” Charles argued in his own defense. “We could all see it, but I saw it most of all. You were growing power-hungry and losing your grip on reality.”
“We should be greater than mere public servants to these humans. We should be more than just cops or soldiers. We should be their gods!” he bellowed. “And soon, we will be.”
***
James and Patrick let their projectiles fly according to the plan, and each boy scored a direct hit—one on each guard’s head.
It probably would have been a total success if the pots had turned out to be ceramic instead of just a heavy-grade plastic. Alas, they bounced off the thugs with a hollow thud. Instead of two guards slumped to the ground with tweeting birds circling their heads, the end result of Bentley’s plan turned out to be two very ticked off guards turning on the kids in anger.
Patrick was the first one to leap off the desk, and even though the NPZ prevented any of his natural speed from kicking in, he was still a quick little bugger. He jumped off the desk, bounced off the back of the bent-over skinny guard, landed on the floor in the doorway, and took off down the hall to the right.
Bentley had wisely prepared a backup plan in case the old “potted plant to the head” gag failed, and it mostly consisted of “everybody run.”
Bentley was second to move from the desk. He tried diving under the fat guard’s legs to get through the doorway, but he was too slow. Freddie tried to follow Patrick’s example, but the guards were too quick; the fat one grabbed Freddie by the leg and then reeled him in.
Poor James, without Henry’s sight, was forced to choose between standing there waiting to be captured and running away without knowing where he was going. He chose the latter, and it was a poor choice. He jumped off the desk and took off running. Two steps into his flight, he tripped over the leg of a chair and careened across the linoleum floor into the concrete wall.
***
“Wait a minute,” I said softly, mostly just to myself. Watching the two old men pick back up a half-century-old disagreement had given me time to think and reflect on some of the things I’d learned throughout the evening. And something didn’t add up in my head. I almost had my finger on it.
They either didn’t hear me or didn’t care, as Finch and Luther continued their argument.
“You think you’re just going to convince this kid to be evil? Join the man who killed his mother?”
That did it, and the bells inside my head began to clang with great force.
Thomas smiled, becoming almost completely calm, nearly looking the part of the kindly old grandfather he should have been all along. “You push someone up to the edge, you’ll see what they’re made of, Luther. All I’m trying to do is find the unlikely hero that was foretold. All I’m trying to do is get him angry.”
“It worked,” I said, loudly and firmly. That got their attention, as both men abruptly turned to face me. “You’re a murderer,” I calmly declared, keeping my rage back for just a moment or two more.
I was staring him down, trying to let him sense how furious I was. But he simply responded by pushing my buttons to get me even more riled up. “I’m sorry, Phillip, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to be more specific. I’ve killed far too many people in my life to have any idea which one you’re referring to.”
“My mother!” I snapped, no longer able to keep the bubbling anger at bay. “You went out of your way,” I chose my words carefully as I continued, “to kill my mother at the precise moment of my father’s partners’ appearance—”
I was almost totally overwhelmed with some of the darkest and most powerful emotions I’d ever experienced.
“—just so that we’d think it was us that caused it instead of you?!”
Perhaps surprised by my conclusions, he didn’t say anything. More likely, he was hoping I’d keep going.
“Didn’t you?!” I asked, a bit more forcefully. “Didn’t you?!” I shrieked. I’d never been more resolute in anything in my life. I was about to kill a man, but first he was going to confess the truth about his actions to what
few witnesses were present.
Finch looked sheepish for a moment and then casually answered, “Yeah. Yes … of course I did, Phillip. Like I said … I had plans—“
“You took her life to further your charade, and you think I’m going to join you?!”
My left arm reached out and lifted slightly, and I used my powers to lift my grandfather up off the ground another ten feet. The rest of his men remained in place suspended a few feet off the ground, but I didn’t even have to think about them to keep them in check. My powers had grown considerably, so much so that I began to wonder if he might even be right about the prophecy referring to me. If the telekinesis had this much extra power lurking below the surface without my knowledge, what else might I be capable of?
“You know how you could have gotten me to join you, old man? Do you want to know what would have worked? How about being a grandfather, you bastard.” I took both my arms, starting them way off to my left, and wiped them quickly across my body to my right, sending my enemy flying twenty-five yards through the air to the school’s exterior wall. His body smacked into it with the sickening sound of bones breaking.
“Phillip!” Henry screamed in shock. He hadn’t expected that level of violence. I wasn’t really myself anymore at that point. I probably hadn’t been for weeks, if I’m honest. The violence was new, but the outburst had been building for a while.
I nudged Finch back away from the building—still dangling in the air, fifteen feet off the ground—and then mercilessly slammed him back into the concrete wall. Henry shrieked again in alarm.
“This is for my mom!” I said, pulling him back away from the wall again just as quickly as I’d thrown him into it.
“Phillip!” Mr. Charles shouted, just as horrified at my actions as Henry was.
“This is for my dad, who never got to have a father because you’re such a selfish asshole!” I sent him into the wall again.