Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1)

by Brent Meske

Santa Claus was an Active. There was no other explanation. Michael, for once, couldn't focus on his e-reader. He kept trying to understand what the Santa guy and Jared McClaren had in common. Maybe, he thought, Charlotte and Jared were in the same place and had some way of communicating. He could see Jared, at least one of the Jareds, getting out of any sort of prison. He could have a riot all on his own, at least. Or he could dig a tunnel a hundred times faster than anyone else.

  So maybe he escaped, and when he did he passed a message on from Charlotte. As a favor maybe. So that left Santa. Was he a prison guard wherever they had Charlotte? Or maybe he was an Active friend who also escaped.

  Thinking about it didn't get him anywhere fast. He just lay on his bed, unable to really get the third book of Eragon moving. It was a million pages long anyway. He could almost feel it weighing him down, pressing on his shoulders.

  Thanksgiving break ended, and he returned to a completely healed school. It was like nobody had split the school open with their own personal psychic earthquake generator. From the foundation to the roof, it had only taken them a week to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

  Just like with Trent, and just like with Jared, Michael was summoned to the counselor's office while the rest of the school had an assembly to discuss what had happened to the school. Mr. Springfield was in the same seat as before, in the little cubicle, but in front of the filing cabinet stood another man.

  Mr. Springfield looked the same as always: like someone had turned a bunch of bricks into a man (just like Stone, he thought), only now he had a thin beard, and the raccoon skin hat he told Michael he wore at the high school. He wore a leather jacket with far too many little fringy things hanging about.

  The new guy was dressed in a business suit, with a wool trench coat folded over one arm. It seemed a little much for a school counselor, with the red tie as well. Above that tie, the guy was square-jawed and had an intense brow, like two caterpillars were staring each other down for a duel to the death. Whatever he might actually be thinking or feeling, he seemed very unhappy.

  “Michael,” Mr. Springfield said with a nod.

  “Hi Mr. Springfield.”

  “This is Mr. Jackson,” he said, and gestured over toward the other man.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mr. Jackson said.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Michael said, and felt super awkward saying it.

  “Now, we're here because you're the hero of the day again,” Mr. Springfield said.

  “Mr. Hero,” Mr. Jackson said. Yeah, definitely unhappy. Bitter maybe.

  “Let's not be like that,” Mr. Springfield said. “Michael did very well.”

  “I think we have to ask ourselves at this point,” Mr. Jackson said. “Why has Michael been the focal point of all three of these incidents so far? What about him has attracted these people. It seems pretty far-fetched that he was in the right place at the right time three times in a row.”

  Right place at the right time, who was he kidding? Michael would have given anything not to be anywhere near Jared when he went kaboom, and definitely would have loved not to be a part of Davey Rightman and his trouble with relationships. A super-powered lovers quarrel was not Michael's idea of a good time.

  “Well, what better way than to ask him?” Mr. Springfield suggested. “So Michael, any idea why you're at the center of this crapstorm?”

  “Um...no, not really.” And he wasn't the center of the Jared thing anyway.

  “You think he's synergistic?” Mr. Jackson asked.

  “How would I know? Are you telling me you don't know?”

  Jackson frowned more deeply, if that was possible. Michael felt something tingling at his scalp, and then his sinuses felt really full, and a headache began creeping up from just above his nose.

  “No, I can't tell.”

  Mr. Springfield stared at him in a new way now.

  “Well son, we're going to have to keep a closer eye on you. I'm sorry it's got to be this way, but if you're synergistic, that means you could Activate others.”

  “Wait...Activate others? There's no way! I wasn't anywhere near any of them when they...when they Activated.”

  “Actives are drawn to synergistic individuals. Like flies to a bug zapper,” Jackson said. Michael was beginning to dislike him quite a lot. Trent was not a fly, and neither was Jared McClaren. And it made Michael look like he was doing the zapping, which he definitely was not.

  “What's going on in the gym?” he asked. He really wanted to be anywhere but here, with Mr. Springfield starting to think he needed someone spying on him for real, not just in his imagination.

  “An assembly,” Mr. Jackson said flatly. “What do you think's happening?”

  Last time he'd gotten the low down from Charlotte, but this time that wasn't possible.

  “Tell me,” Mr. Jackson said, laying his hands down flat on the desk. The trench coat hung off one arm like a bullfighter's black cape. “Do you find you have trouble finding normal friends? And that the normal kids are afraid of you, or jealous of you?”

  Michael didn't answer.

  “Synergistic individuals are shunned by normal baseline individuals, Michael. It's only once they come into their powers that the Actives start flocking around them.”

  “We're done here,” Mr. Springfield said, “Come on Michael. I think it's time we showed you what's going on at these assemblies.”

  Then Terrence Jackson did something very strange. He snapped both his fingers several times, rapidly, and clapped twice, then once. Springfield went very still, and his eyes were suddenly glassy, like Michael looked when he was in the middle of a really good daydream.

  “What—”

  “Shut up,” Jackson said. Michael’s mouth snapped closed. He wasn’t used to being talked to by any adult, not even the one person who was allowed to: his mother.

  “Now listen closely. Neither of you are going to remember this conversation, understand me? We had a nice chat, discussed the strange ability you have for finding trouble, and that was it. No synergists. Now I’m going to snap my fingers and we’re going to head to the gym like nothing happened.”

  Was this man completely off his medication? Apparently not, because when he snapped his fingers Springfield jerked, smiled, and stood up.

  “Come on Michael. I think it’s time we showed you what’s going on at these assemblies.”

  Michael spared one last look at Mr. Jackson and thought the man was probably completely crazy. He had these wild eyes Michael couldn't get over. You just couldn't see them normally, under those enormous eyebrows.

  He got to the gym just in time to see an Active fly through the air and throw someone into the ceiling. It was just a blur, but the woman flew down around the gym while hundreds of students sat, horrified in silence. The man on the ceiling, just a splatter of blood, slowly peeled off and fell headfirst into the floor, thirty feet below. There was a chorus of horrified screaming.

  “These abilities are not a game,” the Active woman said. “They are not cool things we do to show off to our friends. We don't have cheeky classes and throw hyperspeed spit wads at our teachers. When we get these abilities, we're scared, boys and girls. Sometimes excited, but usually scared. We quickly realize how difficult it is to control ourselves. We're afraid of hurting people, like my friend Bob here.”

  She waved a hand back at the squashed man, who was now moving. Several dozen girls and boys screamed.

  “Bob got lucky, he can't be killed. But you didn't know that, did you?”

  Bob was unsticking himself from the floor and crunching his body parts back to their rightful places. He packed his arm bone back into the hole it'd punched out of his skin, and Michael watched while the hole repaired itself. Now some of the boys were laughing and pointing.

  “I wish I could tell you this was fun play time,” the woman said. “It's not. It's not a laughing matter. When you burst into flames, are you going to burn your house down? Are you going to be responsible for killing yo
ur friends or your parents? We hope not.”

  The lights cut out, except for an enormous projector illuminating the massive white rectangle of a screen, maybe twenty feet long and half that tall. A picture appeared, and everyone gasped.

  “This is what happened in Tallahassee Florida,” the woman said. “Just after an Activation.”

  The city was a smoking ruin. One of the buildings had been sheared in half, but there were piles of rubble everywhere. Everywhere, columns of smoke rose lazily into the air, pointing straight to where the damage was the worst. The most terrible part of the photo was a man standing to the side of the photograph, clutching his bleeding arm to one side. He had a microphone in the other, and looked to be in the middle of delivering a newscast. And someone was flying, at least forty feet up and at least a half mile distant. It was little more than a speck, but the roiling, neon red energy was clearly visible all around that figure.

  “These used to be houses, hospitals, schools,” the woman said. “People used to live in them. It only takes one Active to start this.”

  “And Tallahassee is not the only place where this has happened,” Bob the indestructible man said.

  “The problem is, Bob, that some of our young friends here still think this is a piece of cake, that you can run the world if only you have a little bit of power. I don't think they fully understand what it means. I don't know if they can appreciate the responsibility.”

  “I think we need a volunteer,” the woman said.

  Not a single hand went up. Many of the students looked around each other in bright-eyed fear. What sort of thing were they going to do, they were asking each other.

  “How about the young man near the door?” the woman asked.

  Mr. Jackson suddenly gasped and his hands flew up to his head. Okay, creepy. What was everybody doing looking at him?

  Oh gods, the Active lady was pointing at him. Two hundred plus heads all turned to look at him. This was not a good idea. Nobody liked him. They weren't going to care what happened to Michael. A stab of fear sunk into his guts and he felt a weight press on his middle. All at once he felt like he really, really had to pee.

  “Go on, son,” Mr. Springfield said quietly, but Michael could hear the glee in his tone.

  The woman beckoned him forward, then turned back to the row of older men and women standing behind the podium at the base of the projector screen.

  “Mr. L, if you could,” the woman said. “And get ready with Bob’s ability, if you will.”

  A bald man with a smug grin stepped forward. “Absolutely.”

  “Young man, come here please. Everybody, could you help our young volunteer here? Give him a round of applause.”

  A couple of half-hearted claps followed, and more than a few whispers about Michael.

  “Mr. L is just about to give you my abilities,” the woman said. “What's your name son?”

  “Michael. Michael Washington.”

  Fear flashed across her face, here and gone so fast he wasn't sure he really saw it. No, he was sure. After all, there was Grandpa in the line of adults and teachers, at the far end, staring at him. He hadn't seen Grandpa since the sudden insight when he'd sneaked into the school. He didn't really want to see Grandpa right now. Then the fear disappeared from her face, quick as a whip, and the winning smile came again.

  “Well Michael, are you ready?”

  She held a microphone forward for him.

  “Uh...no. Not really.” More snickers.

  “And this is what happens, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. No one is prepared for this sort of thing. And there are those of you who will still walk away from this assembly and go 'this is really cool' and throw yourself off a building or shut yourself in your parents' freezer. And ninety nine of the hundred of you who try, you will die. Now, Michael.”

  He was trembling with fear when she turned to him, bent low, and held the microphone away from them. In a quiet voice, she said, “Don't worry. I know this is going to hurt, but you're not going to be permanently injured in the slightest. Just take a deep breath.”

  Then she brought the mic up and yelled, “Mr. L has given you the power, Michael. Now fly, Mr. Washington!”

  And he was flying.

  Oh God! His feet left the floor and he fell forward onto his face. He hit his head, but he only grazed it because he was still rising up into the air. He was listening to himself screaming, and flailing his body around trying to get a hand on something so he could stop. He smacked into the projector screen and knocked it off the chains holding it.

  There was some new pathway open in his head, some unbearably painful and sweet openness that told him he had the power. Not just flight either, he had power over gravity. Somewhere in his brain was knowledge, or if not knowledge, then the instinct. Superheavy gravity could pull someone to the ground like they weighed seven hundred pounds. Light gravity could send somebody flipping through the air like...like they were in space. Just like Michael was doing right now.

  When he finally hit the ceiling he turned and saw that everyone was starting to float off the bleacher seats in the gym. Lots of them were screaming. Many were holding tight to their seats, hanging upside down. Others were on their way to join Michael in zero G.

  “Stop it!” some were saying. Michael was one of these.

  “Thank you Michael,” the woman said. “Archibald? Archibald? Now would be nice, before any of them got too far—”

  And it stopped. There was one instant of horrible stillness, while gravity still hadn't made up its mind about the LADCEMS gymnasium, only Michael's stomach knew. It dropped somewhere near his sneakers, and the place where it had been completely frozen.

  And he fell.

  He was so sure that he would wake up in the hospital again that he didn't bother opening his eyes. But something wasn't right, it was the wind rushing past his—

  His eyes snapped open just in time to see the floor rushing up, and smashing him into nothing.

  Michael had never thought much about dying. He had read about it plenty of times in plenty of books, and seen it in the movies, where the person sees their life flashing before their eyes. He wished something like that would have happened, so he could think about Charlotte. The trouble was, all these annoying screams were getting in his way. He couldn't think with people being hysterical so close to him. The only people he could think of, oddly, were that woman who flew, and Mr. L, the bald smiling man who was responsible for his death.

  “Archibald, come on now!” the woman was shouting.

  “I'm trying.”

  “You'd best try harder than that, sonny Jim,” Grandpa said, from the end of a long tunnel. How'd he get in this tunnel?

  “You think it's just a switch you can flip?” Mr. L asked.

  “I know of other switches that'll flip if he don't heal up right this second,” Grandpa said.

  “There!” Mr. L shouted in triumph.

  “Michael! Michael! Concentrate, you can do it!”

  He couldn't even breathe, he was drowning. His eyes wouldn't even work. Only that wasn't true, he was just staring at a pool of red. He was blinking, but his eyelashes were scooping up droplets of his own blood and getting tangled together with gore. His muscles were trying to move him out of the sick, sticky feel of his blood, but they weren't on his bones the right way.

  “Uhh,” he said. He hefted his head and shoulders up off the gym floor, and shook his head. His neck screamed in pain for a moment, but stopped after he told his vertebrae to get their act together and get back where they belonged. They answered his call, and he felt the skin protest while the bones slid back into place.

  His hips were shoved sideways, the wrong way. Slivers of pain shot up his body, but he realized it was his bones rushing to join their buddies where they ought to be. He didn't have a gravity center of his brain anymore, he had a regeneration center, and it was definitely instinct this time, his mind controlling the ability to allow his body to live and function. His bac
k cracked a hundred wrong ways as he sat up, and then stood up on shaky legs.

  “I hope most of you remember this demonstration,” the woman was saying. “I know a few of you still won't get it through your heads. Nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine people who try this don't make it, but they still try. Cool will always overcome common sense when it comes to young people, and I have only one thing to say to that: I'll bring flowers to your funeral.”

  Later, he was back in the hospital again, even though he was in perfectly good health. The usual nurses and doctors were swarming around him. Outside their little circle, his mother stood frowning and worried. Mr. Springfield stood close to her, talking low and slow. He still had his ridiculous raccoon skin hat on.

  “I'm fine!” he kept telling them, but they insisted on this or that test. He'd already been in several different machines, which sounded all sorts of strange.

  “What are they checking for?” he asked Mr. Springfield.

  “Sometimes there's internal bleeding,” he said, “If you didn't have Bob's power long enough, for instance. They're also checking for other abnormalities.”

  “What?”

  “It's difficult to know what will happen to someone who takes on others' abilities, even temporarily. Some doctors believe your brain has the instinct wired in there, and that instinct sort of wakes up when Mr. L uses his ability.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He gave you Nora's ability...but the trouble is, when Nora Activated, she had no idea how to control her ability either. She caused a lot of damage before she got it to stop. Almost went to the moon, with half the neighborhood, if I remember right. So you couldn't possibly have learned how to deal with that. It took her years to be able to fly with any sort of speed.”

  “But I went straight up,” Michael said.

  “Right, but going up and down is the easy part of gravity control. Tougher to make yourself move sideways. Especially difficult to move sideways without messing up gravity all over the place around you.”

  “These abilities aren't like people think,” his mother said, with her arms crossed. She wasn't comfortable being near Mr. Springfield. “It's like learning math. There are a lot of things you have to learn.”

  Mr. Springfield chuckled. “Yeah, like learning math all right, only you don't have a teacher and you don't have a set of books. And if you fail the test, you can kill yourself.” Mrs. Washington went red in the face, but Mr. Springfield didn't seem to notice. “The doctors are just trying to figure out if your brain is going to be fine after this. We don't like to let Mr. L use his power much. The side effects can be...unpleasant.”

  “I can't believe they brought Archibald Lansing into this! And on my son,” his mother said, and left the room. Maybe she'd throw something out in the hallway.

  “What's with her?” Michael asked Mr. Springfield. But the big man just shrugged his huge, leather-fringed shoulders.

  He did have a bit of a headache, and there were phantom feelings like he could fly or he could cut off his own arm and everything would be fine. The doctors and his mother assured him that he shouldn't, since he couldn't fly and wouldn't ever recover from a missing arm. More than that, if he did permanent damage to himself without Bob's ability, he wouldn't ever get the arm back.

  The doctors seemed almost disappointed to tell him he was going to be okay, and that there weren't any problems with his brain. They let him go that night, and it was a relief to get back to his own bed. All this business about being in the hospital was getting boring. There were lots of times he couldn't even read a book because they had some test or another to do. Not that he could really read anyway, with the memory of the assembly and seeing his grandfather there. It stirred up an angry hornet's nest of questions in his mind, one he couldn't seem to get under control.

  At home, his mother seemed to blame him for what had happened at school. She stalked around the house, doing rage cleanings. When she got really unhappy, there was always dust to lay siege to. First she vacuumed everything, then cursed herself for a fool, dusted everything, and attacked the floor again.

  “Well I hope your father is happy now,” she kept muttering.

  Michael retreated to his room and listened to the clanging of pots and pans, then of the hiss of the iron.

  It didn't stop the next day either. Susanna Washington wasn't the type of woman to forget things so easily. She seemed preoccupied and distant throughout the morning, but stopped him on the way out the door.

  “You be careful,” she told him.

  “Yes ma'am.”

  “Good, good boy. And if they ask you to go to some assembly or another, you tell them no. You can have them call me. I'll march right down there and give them a piece of my mind.” She'd give them finger shaking to go with it. Up one side and down the other, or something like that.

  “Okay mom,” he said, knowing instantly he would never, ever call her from school unless he had to go to the hospital. Like if he cut off his own arm.

  All throughout school that day, he tried to wrap his head around the idea that Grandpa wasn't just a guy who read off his tablet in the rocking chair on his porch in the summer. He was more than a man with a set of false teeth and an easy smile. The more Michael thought about it, the more he understood that he really knew nothing about his grandfather, and that wasn't necessarily a good thing.

  He was also aware that the solitary, snarky voice in his mind was winning. It was saying 'I told you so' over and over again. He couldn't shake the image of Grandpa bent over the writing desk, penning a lie. He also couldn't help but see Grandpa try to fade back into the shadows and disappear as Michael floated up to the ceiling, seconds away from falling thirty feet and squashing himself like a peanut butter sandwich in a badly packed lunchbox. He got off lucky though. All his teachers called on other students, and didn't bother to penalize him when he didn't have the right answers on his homework.

  The paper route called him home after the seventh bell rang. Normally he'd read a couple of pages in his e-reader, or watch a half hour of after school TV, but today he just threw the papers into his bag and headed out the door.

  He saw Lily at the library again, and exchanged polite hellos as he delivered the paper. She was still looking as good as ever, though he couldn’t help but notice how much like Charlotte she wasn’t. Lily wore plain clothes, like a suit only with a skirt, a white blouse underneath, and didn’t do anything fancy with her hair. She definitely wasn’t changing her wardrobe up every few months. Still, she had a soft glint in her blue eyes. She was kind and talkative, and interested in talking to him. Maybe she wasn’t a friend, but she wasn’t family, and she wasn’t keeping anything from him.

  She asked him how things were going, and he debated about telling her about the assembly yesterday, where he'd nearly killed everybody in the gym. He gave up and told her, especially the weird part about him rearranging his body after the fall.

  “That sucks,” she said. It was always cool hearing her talk to him like this, like he wasn't just a little kid doing a dorky thing like delivering newspapers. Obsolete, pointless newspapers at that, passed by a hundred years ago when computers started bringing all the facts practically straight to your brain instantaneously.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “But it was probably pretty cool to watch, pulling your body back together when everybody thought you were dead.”

  He smiled sadly. It wasn’t that cool, since all his classmates were afraid of him, but there was no sense in worrying her.

  “How’s your friend, that girl?” Lily asked. He’d told Lily the details about Charlotte, and the librarian always asked about her. Sometimes it seemed like Lily was more interested in Charlotte than he was.

  “Missing,” he sighed.

  “That's terrible...really?”

  “I don’t know. I…” He was about to tell her about the note, but stopped himself. Nobody could know, not even someone like Lily. Grandpa had
talked to Lily before, about the e-reader. That meant she could call him too.

  “What?”

  “I’m worried about her,” he said. “I told Santa I wanted to see her again.”

  Now it was Lily’s turn to smile sadly. “That’s so sweet. Well, I hope you can see her. As a Christmas present. It would be pretty nice.”

  He thanked her and headed out to finish his route. He still had a lot to think about, but couldn’t get anywhere on his own. The only things he could do were talk to Grandpa, and accuse him of stealing a letter, or do nothing. He was mortified to start saying bad things about his own grandfather. As his mother told him, if there wasn’t Grandpa, there’d be no you, so you should be grateful to have him every day of your life. There was no way he could march into Grandpa’s house and start pointing fingers. But he could sneak around…

  Yeah, and that had turned out real well last time.

  He’d just turned himself in several circles by the time he got home and found his mother putting a casserole in the oven. At least the papers were all delivered.

  “Hi dear,” she said. “You found your music player, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well you rushed in and out of here so fast I couldn’t ask you. But I guess you found it.”

  What was she talking about? Michael’s mind tried to wrap itself around what she was saying, and failed.

  “Um, yeah. Yeah. I found it.”

  “Alright,” she said. “Well, dinner’s not going to be ready for another two hours, and your father’s not going to be home until Friday, if he even gets back by then. So, let’s crack the books and get some homework done.”

  He wasn’t listening. He hadn’t been in the house since he left to deliver his papers. Had someone been in here, impersonating him?

  He glanced around his room, but couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Bed, bookcase-slash-computer desk, dresser and mini closet looked just like before. No mysterious imposter had cleaned up the clothes pile on the floor, or the scatter of papers at the base of his bed. Old homework. Stone was standing right where he’d stood before.

  Wait. His music player was not in the drawer where he left it, and that was odd. He couldn’t find it anywhere, in fact. This kick started a full-mess search, including throwing the clothes from the floor to other places on the floor.

  “Music player,” he muttered. Of course, it was another clue from Charlotte. If he’d ever doubted her before, about the note or the code, those doubts vanished faster than scraps off the dinner table, with the dog on patrol.

  His clothes were all in the same places as before, all the video games were still in the wrong cases just like before, there weren’t any secret Charlotte notes in the little video game instruction guides, his closet was still a horrible mess only a bulldozer could clear.

  The computer desk still had the usual assortment of ancient pencils and broken and emptied pens. He didn’t have any books about music, and didn’t really have any use for books anymore anyway, since he had the e-reader. He didn’t think any of them had been moved.

  “Stone,” he whispered. As soon as he did, he looked over his shoulder to see if his mother was watching. Then he closed the door and approached the action figure.

  He almost expected it to jump off the computer desk and attack him, but the figure stared woodenly off toward the old Star Wars poster Grandpa had given him. Now he noticed the hands had changed up. This time they were the see-through plastic ones instead of the concrete Michael had snapped on before.

  He took it down carefully, like it was a bomb. His heart hammered in his chest, and he kept looking at the door. If he didn’t, he felt, his mother would burst through it and start prying into his business. Glancing up every few seconds protected him from this.

  He also knew he shouldn't do this slowly. He couldn't help himself. He drew up the figure's shirt and, heart beating wildly in his chest, sweat prickling his forehead, he opened a new note from Charlotte.

  And if it all hadn't been going bad before, this was when it really started to get nasty.

  Chapter 10 - War of the Michaels