by Jeremy Scott
“Of course,” he said, as though he’d just remembered something, “I only have the one trigger. Once I push this button, there’ll be no turning back, son. And at that point, if you can’t save us … no one can.” He leaned down, smiling knowingly. “You sure you don’t just want to tell us the truth about your powers?”
I lifted my head so I was looking directly at his eyes. “I have told you all the truth I know about my powers.”
“Ah,” he said, following it with a sigh.
“Please don’t do this,” I said, figuring it was worth one more shot to try and talk this maniac down from the fiction he’d built in his mind. “Please, I promise you … I don’t have the powers you think I do.”
“But you do, Phillip! You do have them! Just like the baby bird who inches up to the edge of the nest, never really sure that his wings will keep him airborne until his parents push him out, and he faces the cold, stark reality that he is, indeed, falling. It is I, Phillip, who promise you … you do have them. And as soon as you realize it, I’ll have them too. Then let’s see them try to stop us.”
I looked down to the ground, trying to make peace with the fact that I was about to die.
“At least let these people go,” I said, grasping at straws. “You don’t need to put them at risk when all you want is me.”
“Ah, but I do! I do have to. You see … this,” he gestured to the field around him, “is your nest, young man. And I can tell you’ve already made your peace with the fact that death is a possible outcome of our little standoff here. That’s why I need these people here, so that you’ll have a motivated reason to want to save them … to want to flex your muscles and stop my bomb. Your friends … your teachers … your father,” he looked at Dad and then right back to me, “they’ll all be dead in a few short seconds if you aren’t able to save them.”
“Dad,” my father said softly with a noticeable quiver of emotion in his voice. “Whatever this is … don’t do this.”
Thomas looked at my father, not as a father looks at his son, but as a police officer looks at a deadbeat criminal: with disdain. “If your sad puppy-dog eyes didn’t keep me from turning my back on you when you were a kid, what makes you think they’re going to work now? Don’t be so weak, John, it’s always been your biggest flaw.”
He lifted the black box with his left hand and moved his thumb over button.
“No!” I yelled.
“Dad!” My father shouted.
“If I’m right, we’ll see you in a few moments, Phillip. If I’m wrong … well, I’m going to be pretty upset that I wasted an entire year on you.” And with that, he depressed the button.
Almost immediately, there was a large, rumbling explosion. It shook the ground on which we stood and was followed immediately by the ear-piercing sound of a thousand panes of glass shattering, as each of the school’s windows blew out in spectacular fashion.
“You’d better hurry up and do something, Phillip. I can’t stop it now!” Thomas cackled. He was genuinely enjoying the carnage.
The second explosion came only a few short seconds later and made the first look like a child’s firecracker.
The force of the blast knocked me to the ground and sent me tumbling as the school walls burst into thousands of pieces. Debris flew everywhere. Finch had guessed right, and hunks of concrete and metal smacked into some of the custodians on both sides of the battle, sending them flying and knocking some of them unconscious.
I’ll remember the sound of that second explosion forever. It started with the roar of a jet engine but was quickly replaced by silence, as the sheer decibel level of the blast momentarily deafened me. When it returned, it did so in a pulsing scream.
I looked up from my prone position in the direction of my grandfather. My images had changed again, and I instantly could tell I was receiving pictures from him and not from Henry. The blast must have incapacitated Dad’s partner who had been holding Thomas and his men at bay with the NPZ. I whipped my head to the right, only to find Henry’s empty wheelchair tipped over on its side. Henry was twenty feet away, passed out, with flaming chunks of school property set around him like sentries.
I looked left to where my father was and saw him face down on the ground. Behind him, most of the rest of the hero force had been wiped out or knocked clear by the explosion. Even most of Thomas’ men were out of commission.
Twenty yards away, I saw Freddie grow rapidly to his full-empowered size—probably out of instinctive reaction—and then immediately shrink again, gasping for breath.
I turned back to look at the school, only to see a horrific, charred shell of a building. A few support walls still stood, and the building’s foundational outline was intact. But it was otherwise leveled, burning, and in pieces.
I had been correct. I did not have all the powers in the world, and hidden abilities had not been awakened by Thomas’s final, violent catalyst. I was just a regular old blind kid with some fairly cool telekinetic powers. But I was no Elben.
Frankly, it was a relief. I’d rather face death than the prospect of joining forces with such an evil person … or being his prisoner for the rest of my life, while he milked my powers for his own gain.
I looked at his eyes and slowly rose to my feet, my gaze never wavering. I said nothing. I did nothing. My silent fortitude conveyed my message entirely: I cannot stop you, but I will not yield to you.
Screw you, Grandpa.
For a moment, he seemed surprised. His eyes widened. Fires raged throughout the treetops above us, dropping ash and ember all around us. I knew what came next, and I knew I couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t even going to try anymore.
My father’s father looked around, surveying the damage and taking in all he’d lost in his pursuit of what he thought was a sure thing. He looked back to me. His eyes flashed with defiance. Suddenly, he was directly in front of me, having teleported inches from my position. More than half his face, from his lower left jaw to his upper right temple, was mangled in raised, discolored scarring. Artimus must have hit him square in the face with that lightning bolt on that night so many years ago. He shook his wiry, wrinkled finger in my face, silently scolding me. Then he leaned down quickly to my ear. “I’m very disappointed in you, grandson.”
Then Ooph!, he was gone. And yet I was still able to see. No Henry, no grandfather—yet I still had some kind of images being sent to my brain, with a faint blue tint behind them. I didn’t get to enjoy it or analyze it much. I looked up to find every one of Finch’s soldiers was gone. I’ve never felt more dread and misery than I did in that one moment, as I realized I was about to die.
I briefly thought about Mom. I wondered if there would be an afterlife and if it would be such a paradise as to at least let me be together again with her there.
But I thought no more about winning or living.
I turned back to the school just in time to see the flash of light from the atom bomb, the third and final explosion.
***
Honestly, that’s where things should have ended. That white-hot light should have been the last thing I ever saw.
But it wasn’t.
I’m not sure how to explain it, and I’m even more worried about you believing it, but I promise you that time slowed down to a crawl for me in that moment. What I witnessed over the next several moments should have taken place in a nanosecond, completely invisible to the human eye. And yet … I saw it all … I heard it … I got to experience every bit of it in a dreamlike state.
As the blinding white light emanating from the school began to slowly grow in size, another light appeared. It was moving much faster than the explosion, and it was blue, and it more resembled a line than a ball. It zipped left and right, high and low, zigzagging all over the field, leaving a trail that created a spiderweb pattern in the sky. It was moving at lightning speed, even with this bizarre slowed-down perspective I was enjoying.
The explosion, meanwhile, continued to inch forward, chugging along like a snail,
with the white ball of light growing by minuscule amounts—but definitely growing.
Having already resigned myself to certain death, I was more bemused by what I was seeing than shocked. I was living in the middle of a slow-motion nuclear explosion with bright blue lights in the sky … I was more in awe than anything.
The line of blue light shot here and there out above the field, and I began to notice that some of the heroes were missing. And that’s when I realized what the blue light was. It was a person trying to save us!
The lines in the sky were like tracer rounds on bullets, marking the trail like breadcrumbs where this mystery savior had been. Whoever it was appeared somewhere on my left, and I wheeled to try and see, but they was already gone again … with my father in tow … leaving only a brilliantly colored loop in their wake. Though the real world was moving at a tiny fraction of its normal speed, the blue-light hero was still moving too fast for me to see. And I still didn’t even have any clue as to why I could see.
I turned my head back to the right, just in time to see a trail of brilliant blue light dance away from where Henry’s body had been lying.
One by one, this person was pulling us all away to safety, all while the nuclear bomb continued its glacial explosion. I don’t know if the time was really slowed down or if I just imagined it … or if it was merely something I imagined to help me process what I saw.
The explosion grew and began to climb up into the sky, and the shockwave from the blast formed a circle parallel to the ground, which began to quickly expand outward.
Soon, there were enough blue tracer lights above and around the school property to create a faint glow over the field, and it seemed everyone had been lifted and taken away but me. I spun around to try and catch the light I saw coming toward me, but it was already upon me.
In a flash, I felt myself lifted up off solid ground and into the sky, with the rush of air around my ears telling me I was moving at speeds I’d never fathomed, though it still seemed slow, like in a dream. I turned my head slightly during the flight, stretching to try and see who the mystery hero was, but I couldn’t get my bearings right; we were moving too quickly. I was facing down—looking toward the earth below as we streaked through the air—unable to see the identity of my rescuer.
For a brief flash of a moment I felt at peace, flying through the air at speeds defying logic, racing over the decimated Freepoint landscape below. It was the strangest, most serene feeling I’ve ever encountered. For a moment, I wondered if I had actually died already and was being ferried to heaven in the most brilliant way possible.
And then, just like that, I felt solid ground beneath my feet again. And the light dimmed as the savior of Freepoint stood before me, a faint blue hue glowing around him.
It was Donnie.
He looked completely healed, as though he’d never even had a scratch on him. He gripped both my shoulders and leaned down, like a father teaching his son a lesson on the Little League diamond. He smiled—the warmest smile I’d ever seen—and said softly, “Don’t worry, Phillip. Donnie fix.”
And just like that, he was gone, with nothing but the vapor of blue light in his place. I looked up to see the chaser round headed back toward the explosion, which I could still see off in the distance. I looked left and then right and saw all the others had been brought to the same location … Henry, my father, Patrick … all of them.
We weren’t that far away from the bomb. Donnie had deposited us all in Mr. Charles’ cornfield near the outskirts of town. It wasn’t remotely far enough to escape death from the explosion, and I momentarily wondered if Donnie’s mental handicap had doomed us all to die anyway: rescued … just not rescued quite fully enough.
But then I saw the trail of bright blue, growing wider and more pure in color, as it streaked straight toward the now ballooning mushroom cloud, picking up speed. Even with the effect of time being slowed, I struggled to keep up with the new information my brain was processing.
I stood there, completely still, dumbfounded, as I watched my friend race at freakish speeds toward certain destruction. Even in shock there were obvious conclusions I could draw. Donnie was definitely fast; we already knew that. But Donnie was also flying. Heroes didn’t get two powers—other than the occasional Jekyll-Hyde I’d heard about, but those were always more like split personalities, with two variations of a similar power.
There was only one hero in the entire history of our kind who had more than one root power, and that was—Wait … is he …?
“The one who can do all?”
It was Donnie, not me. Had Finch—my grandfather—been right all along about the prophecy but merely picked the wrong disabled, downtrodden kid?
One who doesn’t see the world as we do!
I’d been so deceived by Finch that the prophecy had begun to seem written for me—the blind kid. But it was a perfect fit for Donnie as well. There had also been great suffering for him, and now he was showing up in our time of need to save the day. The last man standing. The unexpected hero.
A mix of emotions flowed over me; relief blended with sorrow and happiness with sadness.
Donnie’s blue trail made a beeline straight for the looming explosion like an expertly thrown dart sent to pop a balloon.
“Donnie, no!” I yelled helplessly.
Just as he neared the explosion, the slow-motion effect dissipated, and time seemed to right itself, fast-forwarding again to a normal speed. It was jarring. When Donnie reached the point of impact, there was a gigantic sonic boom loud enough to make me cover my ears and knock half of us onlookers to the ground.
Just at the point where he made impact with the mushroom cloud, a shiny black sphere appeared, rapidly growing in size. It was accompanied by the sound of intensely loud static, not unlike an improperly-tuned radio, only a million times louder. It was a terrifying sound.
As the opaque black ball continued to grow in size exponentially, the explosion from Finch’s bomb seemed to weaken as the light and smoke and debris were all slowly pulled toward Donnie like a magnet.
The black-hole power!?
Within seconds, the black orb had grown rapidly, hovering over our heads and the entire city like a small moon. The bomb’s effects—debris, fire, smoke, and radiation—were all being sucked into Donnie’s black hole, which fed off the added energy and only continued growing exponentially in size.
Soon, he’d gobbled up every bit of light and smoke from Finch’s bomb, and all that remained was Donnie’s black circle of energy, hanging over the city like a dark and twisted moon. The deafening static continued a few seconds.
Then the sphere it began to shake, shiver, and vibrate. Suddenly, the edges of the circle raced inward with intense speed as the entire ball collapsed in on itself. When the edges reached the center, there was an audible but faint—and ultimately anticlimactic—popping sound. And then it was gone. Disappeared. Evaporated, along with every ounce of danger and destruction from the bomb.
Half a second later, my vision disappeared as well, and the survivors of the Freepoint Massacre were left to gape and stare at each other in confused relief.
Chapter 32: Summer
The recovery efforts took months—and not just the physical rebuilding of Freepoint. There were emotional scars, in many cases more damaging than the physical toll Thomas Sallinger’s attack had taken. It would be a long time before Freepoint would be able to trust anyone completely again, hero or villain.
One of the city’s most decorated and celebrated heroes of old had come back to wipe it off the map. It would take some time before anyone in town could feel 100 percent normal again.
There was mourning to be done, to be sure. One hundred seven citizens—mostly custodians, but several human support as well—had been killed. Four hundred twenty-five more were injured in some way, from the superficial to the serious.
Many of the casualties were people I knew. Steve was one of them, wiped out with the rest of his team by the same power that had be
en used to put my mother in a coma. Coach Tripp was another casualty, struck down defending the hospital from a dozen of my grandfather’s men.
Everyone knew someone who’d been hurt or killed. It was a tragedy that impacted literally every single citizen of Freepoint. There’d been a handful of memorial services, tributes, and candlelight vigils. And the footsteps of everyone around town seemed a bit heavier for quite a while.
It was hard for me to come to grips with the fact that my own flesh and blood had been behind such atrocities. He’d escaped, of course, along with several of his men, and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. Dad said he was the most wanted man in the world among custodian forces and that he’d probably be the stupidest criminal in history to ever show his face around Freepoint again. It didn’t make me sleep any better, and yet … at least I found comfort knowing that I ultimately didn’t have anything he wanted.
It had been Donnie all along who did. And now he was gone, too, though most of us Ables were reluctant to pronounce him dead and gone forever. The truth is, none of the adults had ever seen the kind of power Donnie displayed that night, particularly the fabled black-hole ability, which some had written off as a myth. No one could say for sure whether he had died or simply transported somewhere else in time and space. But I couldn’t help thinking if he were alive, he would have come back.
Still, I held out hope that somehow my friend had lived and was out there somewhere in the universe, leaving a brilliant trail of blue light wherever he went.
The town erected a monument in Donnie’s honor but only because Bentley harassed the city council with legal filings to get them to do it. Left to their own, I don’t know that they would have done anything. Everyone knew it had been Donnie who saved the day, but it was a complicated issue. I guess it was just hard for some people to admit that their salvation had come from a kid like Donnie, especially the ones who’d been the most outspoken against him earlier.