I wasn’t sure it was working, but then I heard the whine of the inhibitor. That meant I was doing something – hopefully what I intended.
At the same time, there was a mighty smack against the weakened vault door that echoed throughout the area - like a hammer ringing out against steel - and the bulge ripped open with a metallic shriek. Through the gap it now provided came a powerful-looking, well-muscled arm. The door was yielding fast.
The hand at the end of the arm reached around madly, obviously trying to find what, if anything, was helping wedge the door shut. Electra and Smokey scrambled out of the way, but I stayed put, still trying to keep weight on the door. I leaned away from the hand as far as I felt I could without compromising my position on the vault.
I looked to see how Mouse was doing. There was a glowing sphere next to him now, and inside it a vague but recognizable figure: Alpha Prime. Mouse had found him, but needed more time to dissolve the dimensional pocket.
With greater speed and agility than I imagined, the hand through the door suddenly latched onto my shoulder. Then it began to squeeze.
“Open the door!” a voice on the other side demanded, as the hand squeezed harder.
The inhibitor was giving off a high-pitched squeak now. Its logic circuit seemed to be having trouble getting a lock on what I was doing – probably due to the fact this was a power (or an aspect of a power) that I really hadn’t tried before.
The hand continued its unrelenting assault on my shoulder, and I screamed as I felt bones starting to grind painfully against each other in unnatural fashion. Smokey yelled at Electra to fry the arm with her electricity.
“I can’t!” Electra answered. “I’ll electrocute Jim, too!”
Instead, both she and Smokey beat at the hand and arm ineffectually with their fists. I don’t think the person on the other side even noticed. As for me, I was pouring everything I had into a two-fold mission: continuing to increase my body’s overall density, and – in particular – making my trapped shoulder as dense and solid as possible.
The inhibitor, still unable to get a lock on my power, kept up its insidious whining. Under my feet, I felt the floor beginning to buckle and crumble as my massively increased density and weight put unwarranted pressure on it. The pain in my shoulder slowly lessened as my body became firmer, harder. I could feel my assailant growing frustrated and trying to squeeze harder as the former suppleness of my shoulder gave way to something more compact.
Suddenly, the whining of the inhibitor came to a halt. The hand continued trying to cause damage, but it was just a bit of a nuisance now. Looking around, I saw that almost all eyes in the room were fixated on me. The only exception was Mouse, who worked unceasingly to try to free his teammate. On his part, Alpha Prime was clearly visible, and I could actually hear him trying to say something. It seemed to be directed at me, but the sound came through muffled and distorted, making it impossible to figure out what he was trying to convey.
“Step aside,” demanded a disturbingly calm voice on the other side of the door. It was Paramount, and at his order the hand and arm withdrew. The sound of his voice gave me an odd chill, and it dawned on me with clear certainty what he was about to do.
“Get back!” I screamed at those near me, wildly gesticulating. I don’t think anyone realized what was about to happen, but an eerie blue light began to seep in around the frame of the door and the hole where the hand had come through.
“Kid, cover that door!” boomed a loud voice. It was Alpha Prime, not yet free but finally coherent.
In fact, I had already begun shapeshifting as soon as I realized what was happening, not taking on any particular form but rather just trying to stretch myself high enough and wide enough to blanket the vault door in its entirety. The inhibitor was making noise again but I ignored it, focusing instead on any place where the azure color was seeping in and trying to cover it. The blue light was an indicator of the areas I needed to block, but also confirmed my worst fears.
Paramount was preparing to fire his Bolt Blast. His most powerful weapon. The one that could obliterate anything.
I looked around the room one last time. I saw a bunch of teens, terrified for the most part and attempting to hide behind boxes and bins. With Paramount so unhinged, it was unlikely that many on our side would survive this day – me among them. But I could buy them – buy Mouse – a few more precious moments to hope. I could see Alpha Prime punching wildly against the sphere that held him while Mouse continued working feverishly without pause.
I was braced against the door, still trying to stretch my body out, when the inhibitor stopped making noise. That was it; I’d covered as much of the door as I could. Sadly, a few slivers of blue luminescence were still coming through when the light suddenly intensified. I closed my eyes, thinking about all the things I’d done, and all the things I’d never do. How sixteen years just didn’t seem like enough time to live a life. How I’d never even had a real girlfriend. How I’d never learned to drive.
Later, I would try to remember exactly what occurred next, but so much seemed to happen almost simultaneously. The door of the vault seemed to bulge out in my direction for a second, and then just melt away. It vanished, like dew evaporating in the morning sun. A cascade of warmth bathed my back, pressed against it like a gentle, soothing massage. Briefly I wondered if this was the afterlife – whether eternity was simply going to feel like faint, ever-expanding warmth.
“No,” a voice, Paramount’s, uttered in disbelief. “It’s impossible!”
I opened my eyes, surprised that I still had eyes to open. I immediately looked behind me, to Mouse’s lab. As I did so, something slid off my neck and to the ground. It was the inhibitor. The back of it had been obliterated by Paramount’s Bolt Blast; with nothing to hold it in place around my neck, it had simply fallen off.
Paramount was standing about twenty feet away from me, mouth practically agape. All of his henchmen were behind him.
As I suspected, the vault door was nowhere to be found. It had essentially been vaporized. The real question, though, was why hadn’t I been expunged along with it?
That apparently was the thing that was also plaguing Paramount, because he suddenly began firing more Bolt Blasts at me.
“Impossible!” he screamed, while continuing to fire at me. “Impossible! Impossible!”
I almost went insubstantial, but then I remembered everyone in Mouse’s secret room and stood my ground. The Bolt Blasts hit me, but had no effect.
Oddly enough, it was Paramount’s unbridled rage that bought us more time. As long as he was firing Bolt Blasts at me, no one who was with him could rush us. I think this must have occurred to someone else, because several of the people with Paramount tried calling his name, but he didn’t seem to hear them. Finally, one of the guys behind him – a red-skinned monstrosity with horns and a forked tail called Daemon - placed a hand on Paramount’s shoulder to get his attention.
Paramount angrily turned his gaze on him…and Daemon evaporated from the torso up. There was stunned disbelief for a second, and then his entire group began scattering like chickens trapped in a henhouse with a fox.
Aqua turned to liquid, a puddle on the floor, and then fled underneath some nearby equipment with frightening speed. Incendia became living flame and went streaking out the doorway. One by one, they all scrambled to flee or take cover from their mad leader.
As for Paramount himself, he initially didn’t seem to realize what he’d done. After a few seconds it must have sunk in, because the glow of his Bolt Blast faded from his eyes, but by that time most of his followers had fled or were hiding as best they could in Mouse’s lab.
His vision swung back to me. “You! This is all your fault!”
He made as if to charge me, but he hadn’t taken more than two steps when something flew out of Mouse’s hidden room in a blur of speed.
A hand of incalculable strength gripped Paramount’s neck in a vise and lifted him off the ground.
Paramount struggled maniacally, beating at the hand that held him in vain. His legs kicked wildly in the air. He looked comically like a child struggling to get away while being held aloft by a parent. In fact, that’s exactly what the situation was.
Alpha Prime held his wayward offspring up off the ground by one hand. He turned to look at me.
“Kid, are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I replied.
“Good, check on the others,” he said almost casually, essentially ignoring the struggling giant in his hand. Paramount, on his part, never stopped fighting, and even fired his Bolt Blast at his father. They had no more effect on Alpha Prime than they’d had on me. Alpha Prime sighed and placed his free hand over his son’s eyes. Screaming in frustration, Paramount brought both his hands up and tried futilely to pull away the fingers covering his eyes. Not a single digit moved.
Seeing that, I kind of understood now what had caused Paramount such anguish that he became unhinged. Alpha Prime was raw power – limitless, timeless, and absolute. Juxtaposing any human, even a superhuman, against the standard he represented was not just unfair but cruel.
Chapter 24
The next few days were extremely hectic. As it turned out, we didn’t escape Paramount’s last assault completely unscathed. One poor kid just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and one of Paramount’s Bolt Blasts had taken the top of his head off. Another had lost a foot. All in all, however, we were quite lucky.
The security footage had essentially identified everyone who was working with Paramount. However, after eventually being rounded up, quite a few of them claimed to have been intimidated into doing his bidding. Others claimed to have been misled, asserting that Paramount – through his position of leadership – had convinced them that what they were doing was right. Finally, a few hid behind their status as minors under the law, claiming they couldn’t be prosecuted. No one knew exactly how it would all shake out.
As for Paramount himself, he was currently being housed at a secure facility in an undisclosed location. I probably could have gotten more details if I wanted to, but I didn’t press. Instead, I spent my time essentially being an errand boy for Mouse: go here; go there; do this; do that.
Much to my surprise, it seemed that Mouse was actually the de facto head of Alpha League instead of Alpha Prime, as everyone generally assumed. When I asked him how that had come about, Mouse had just shrugged, making a vague comment about superheroes needing more than just tangible super powers. Other than that, he essentially avoided answering my questions about almost everything, preferring to say that we’d have time to talk later.
Alpha Prime generally kept to himself during this time. Other than helping out with repairs to League HQ, no one really saw him.
“He’s got some issues to work out,” Rune said when I asked him. “It’s not every day that you find out your child is a maniac who wants you dead.”
With the threat of imminent harm removed, Braintrust had moved Mom and Gramps to the penthouse suite of a five-star hotel. Needless to say, they were loving it.
I had dinner with them every day. So it was that a few days later when I stopped by for my daily visit I got the surprise of my life.
I’d taken to arriving at their suite in a normal fashion: taking the elevator up, knocking on the door, etc. On this particular occasion, my grandfather opened the door and let me in. Usually, he’d give me a mental hello, but I got nothing this time so I knew that something was going on.
As I followed him into the suite, I heard voices. I recognized my mother’s, and the other was also familiar, but a little distorted by the acoustics in the penthouse. I had assumed it was one of BT’s clones, but when I entered the living area I saw that I was wrong. Dead wrong.
There he was, sitting on a sofa across from my mother, who was lounging in a recliner. He was wearing a business suit rather than a costume, but I didn’t have any trouble recognizing him. I’d studied him my whole life, from every angle, every side, every direction, every perspective. I’d have known him anywhere – in or out of a costume, with or without a cape, in a business suit, in swimming trunks, even in a Santa Claus suit.
It struck me as odd that I knew so much about a man who knew so little about me.
A man who probably couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.
A man who probably hadn’t thought about me since the day I was born.
Alpha Prime. My father.
That he was here meant only one thing: he knew who I was. My mind was reeling. He’d avoided me my entire life. I really didn’t want to deal with this now.
Still staring at him, I took a few steps backwards, then did a full one-eighty and prepared to walk back out the door. My mother’s voice brought me up short.
“John Indigo Morrison Carrow!” she screamed, coming to her feet. “Get your butt back over here!”
I rarely heard anyone say my whole name. However, it was a name meant to embody my entire heritage. John was my grandfather’s given name, while Indigo was my grandmother. Carrow was our family name, and as for Morrison…well, that was Alpha Prime’s actual surname, although few people knew it. For as long as I could remember, though, everyone had always called me “Jim,” based on my first three initials. Calling out my full name meant only one thing: Mom was irritated with me. (Not to mention the fact that her eyes, I could sense, were flashing crimson.)
Slowly I turned around and came back into the living room. I kept my eyes downcast.
“Don’t be rude, Jim,” my mother continued. “We have a guest.”
Alpha Prime stood up. “It’s okay, Geneva. We’ve actually already met.”
The words sounded odd, out of place - more suited to business acquaintances bumping into each other at a country club rather than father and son. When I still didn’t say anything, my mother turned to me.
That last one was a bit of a shock. I had just assumed that it was my mother who had reached out. Taking my silence for acquiescence, she turned and started leaving the room.
“I’ll leave you boys to catch up,” she said as she went into her bedroom suite. I looked around for my grandfather, hoping to find support in that corner, but he had conveniently disappeared at some point after letting me in.
With a disgusted sigh, I flopped down and took my mother’s spot sitting across from my father. I wasn’t ready for this. I hadn’t wanted to have this conversation yet. It was one thing to be around him when he didn’t have a clue who I was. There was no pressure then, no expectations, no agenda. It was something else when he knew that I was his son, that there was some kind of connection between us.
There was an uncomfortable silence as we both struggled for something to say. Or rather he did; there was no way I was speaking up first. I crossed my arms, sat back and waited.
“Uh, Jim,” he began after a few moments, “I just want to say that I’m proud of how you handled yourself during this crisis that we had. I mean, with your…with the situation with Paramount.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.
“He’s got to face justice for what he’s done. But at the same time, it’s clear that he also needs therapeutic help. I should have seen what was happening to him.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing, then, that you weren’t around, if that happened right under your nose. Who knows what kind of trouble I might have gotten into?”
He just stared at me for a second. I could tell that I
had hit him hard – and possibly below the belt.
“Okay, I probably deserved that,” he said after a moment. “But there’s no way you’d ever have turned out like that. Not with your mother and grandfather raising you.”
“Is that why you weren’t around, then? Because you knew that there was somebody else to pick up the slack?”
“I wasn’t around because I was already raising Paramount in the middle of a three-ring circus. From the moment he was born, everything he did was news. Cameras were around him night and day. It was an unhealthy environment, and as you can see, it took its toll. By the time you came along two years later, I knew I had to put some distance between us if you ever stood a chance of having a normal childhood.”
“Yeah, right. You’re father of the year.”
“Ask your mother if you don’t believe me. She grew up in that same spotlight – the child of two superheroes – and it was no fun. Your grandparents did their best to shield her, but it was still no picnic.”
“You talk about my mother like you actually cared about her.”
“I did. I do. She came along at a time when I was…lost. Paramount’s mother had taken off, I was raising a kid all alone while trying to save the world - literally save the world - at the same time. And I was incredibly lonely.”
He chuckled. “I know, I know. How can you be lonely when everyone in the world is clamoring to be your friend, to hang out with you, to just be seen with you? And yet, I was. I was a hair’s breadth from chucking it all away when your mother came into my life. She saved me.”
“Is that why you’re here now? Are you lost and needing to be saved again since your number-one son went off the reservation? What was it that made you finally crawl out of the woodwork?”
“The talk we had the other night. Up on the roof.”
Now it was my turn to be shell-shocked.
“You…you already knew who I was?”
The Kid Sensation Series Box Set Page 16