Aberrant Trilogy 1: Super Charged (9 page)

“You really didn’t have to stick up for me the way you did,” she says, her voice soft. “I’m used to handling my own battles.”

“I wasn’t going to just sit there and let him harass you,” I say quickly. “In case you haven’t noticed, I come from a family of heroic men. I’d be pretty lame if I dropped the ball and let the legacy go just like that.”

“It’s refreshing,” says Kimberly. “And you’re only here for a few more weeks. You could have just stayed in the background.”

This is getting too sentimental for me. I give her a smile and say, “You made sure that I wasn’t dead on the shore of the lake. I was just returning the favor.” I motion to the roadway. “Shall we?”

We make our way out of the field and I help her step over the fence. Then we head back to the house.

I am really relieved that Kimberly didn’t see me doing anything with my powers. If she had seen me trying to fly, she would have either been shocked out of her mind, or if I had failed then she would have seen me break my arm falling out of that tree.

Testing out the flying thing will have to wait for later.

By the time we get to the house, the sun is starting to get lower behind the trees.

We haven’t really talked most of the way, except to comment on the scenery. I’m just starting to get used to the lake area, though I really would rather be back in the city.

We come to a stop at the end of the driveway.

Grandma notices us standing there and pokes her head out the window.

“Shaun, don’t dawdle. Dinner is almost on the table!”

Then she leaves us alone.

“I need to head inside,” I say. “See you at school tomorrow.”

“Shaun - wait one second,” says Kim.

I stop partway down the walkway and turn to face her, waiting for her to go on. This is the most bizarre time I’ve had with a girl in my entire life. It almost feels like it’s not really happening - that it’s just a dream.

But, it’s not a dream. I play it cool.

“If you want,” says Kim, “you can come by my house sometime with Robby. My dad has a dock and everything.” She gives me a sly smile. “Maybe I can even teach you how to swim.”

I smirk.

“Sure,” I say. “That sounds great.”

From inside, Grandma calls again. I poke my thumb at the front porch.

“I gotta go. See ya.”

Then I head inside and Kimberly continues on down the road.

13

Trial By Night

The next few days go by at a snail’s pace.

The only thing I want to do is mess around with my new powers, but instead I have to sit through boring classes and unbearable lunches, pretending to like the school food and force conversation. Robby is still treating me like I’m some sort of hero, and Kimberly has thankfully not asked about my random act of strength since Wednesday afternoon when we walked back from the field.

By the time Thursday evening rolls around I am mentally exhausted. All my notebooks have random questions etched into the margins. I have so many questions. How far can I blast energy? Where does the energy come from? How much control do I have over it?

These are all things that I can only find the answers to by experimenting.

So, Thursday night, when Grandma heads to bed early and Grandpa falls asleep watching re-runs of
The Price Is Right
on the gameshow network, I sneak out the back door with the Vestige and hurry out into the yard.

It’s dark enough that nobody will see me.

For about two hours I practice shooting off energy blasts. It’s rough at first. In a way, I feel like a kid learning to ride a bike without training wheels. A few of the blasts get away from me, either being too big for me to hold, or too wild for me to direct, and they go zipping to the right and end up striking one of the pine trees at the edge of the yard. Bits of bark and needles go spraying everywhere.

Someone would be foolish to get in the way of one of these blasts when I send it out full-force, I think.

After so long, I become exhausted. I wonder if it’s because of all the energy I’m using up. Combined with how late it is, I head back inside and crash.

The next day I repeat the process all over again. School is long, but soon enough I’m out of that place and waiting for the sun to go down so that I can practice shooting energy again. Grandma and Grandpa can’t go to bed fast enough when I’m in the back yard again, sending balls of light up into the air this time, watching them get smaller and smaller until they disappear into the dark clouds.

A thought returns to me, one that I had the other day.

Flight…

What would it be like to be up in those dark clouds right now? Am I capable of getting there?

The idea terrifies and electrifies me. I want to be up in the sky so badly, but the idea of getting up high and then not knowing how to get back down - and landing in a splatter - keeps my feet rooted to the grassy ground that I’m standing on.

But, I have to try something, if only to see if I can do it.

I head over to the porch and step up onto it. Only two feet off the ground can’t hurt me too badly. At least this way I can test out these abilities without truly injuring myself. It’s a lot smarter than my original idea of leaping from that gnarly tree.

A gust of wind rustles my clothing and I hold my hands out to my sides, flattening out my palms and spreading my fingers like I do to create the balls of energy.

“Come on…” I mutter softly to myself. “You can do this. Come on…”

With my bare feet, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and step off the porch.

No matter what I expected or what I do, it’s not enough. I land on the ground like a ton of bricks. My legs buckle and I roll onto my side with a grunt.

“Well, that didn’t work,” I say, getting back to my feet and brushing the grass off of my pants.

I return to the top of the porch to try again. Practice will make perfect, after all.

The only real trick here is that I have absolutely no idea if I can actually achieve flight or even levitation through trial and error. In the comic books, Super Guy just happened to have all of his powers appear sporadically, which is how the energy blasts appeared to me this week.

But, so far, no other powers have presented themselves. I am stepping into uncharted territory with my foot literally reaching out into the dark night air. I am trying to force the powers to emerge, and whether that will be successful or not remains to be seen.

Still, I try again, stepping out into the air. I flex my fingers out and try to blast a few pulses at the ground and manage to hang in mid-air for a split second before the energy dies and I tumble to the grass once more.

I land more gracefully this time.

That was really close!

My determination builds as I try a few more times, each time managing to stay in the air for a second before my hands become tired and the energy wears off. Then I fall back to earth.

After twenty minutes of testing out flight, or in this case, barely staying off the ground, I am sweaty and my arms ache from trying to hold my own weight aloft. I rub my fingers together, trying to massage the muscle aches from the fleshy pads of my fingertips. This energy stuff doesn’t look so painful in the comic books.

Come to think of it, in the comic books there isn’t much explanation as far as flight goes. Super Guy wakes up levitating one morning and that was all the story really needed for an explanation. From that point on, he could fly.

But, the villains could also fly.

I have a glimmer of hope in my mind for a moment until I remember that there weren’t really any scenes about the villains learning to fly, either.

I take a seat on the porch steps with a frustrated groan.

“Am I ever going to make sense of all of this?” I ask myself.

The odds seem impossible. Was I too naive to think that I could take a fictional book and use it as guidelines for learning to harness superhuman powers?

I head into the house and get a glass of water from the sink, gulping it down greedily.

I need to change my strategies.

Going at these powers without any research other than reading the comic books seems very unstable and unpredictable. I need real research, and that’s something I can only get back in Boston. It’s where my father’s notes are filed away at the publishing house. There might also be something hiding in Dad’s home office. Admittedly, neither Mom nor myself have set foot in the office in a long time due to the pain of the memories, but if I can find something in his notebooks that will help me to make sense of these powers - to make actual progress in learning how to harness them - it will be worth the sadness.

I put my glass in the sink and head to my room. Once I’m closed inside, I realize that I can’t do all this research on my own. It’s such a huge task. It would be better to have a second set of eyes looking so that I can cover twice as much ground in the same amount of time. Time is the limiting factor since getting into my father’s archives at the publishing house requires an appointment.

I grab my notebook out of my duffel bag and start jotting down things I need to do. There’s the appointment to book, travel to figure out, not to mention getting permission to leave the state from Grandpa and Grandma.

That will be the tricky part. It will take a fair amount of lying. But, I figure that lying about this won’t hurt anybody.

Then there’s the subject of who will be my partner in crime.

I put the end of my pen in my mouth and chew on it for a moment. Then I take it out to jot down the name of the only person who could be trusted with my life on a dime: Mae.

14

To Boston

Driving in Boston is a pain in the ass. Trust me. They don’t call us Mass-holes for nothing. So, instead of begging to borrow Grandpa’s truck, I settle for a round-trip train ticket for Sunday morning on the DownEaster.

Grandpa drops me off at the station and I lug a modest backpack with me. Inside are the essentials - a few pens, my battered spiral notebook, and a change of clothes if I need it. Tucked inside my shirt is the Vestige, strung around the chain that hangs from my neck. It feels safer to keep it there than to risk losing it in a pocket or having it fall out of my backpack.

The Amtrak is comfortable. I get a window seat and wait for the train to pull out. Once it does, I find myself in a trance state, watching the scenery of Maine disappear and morph into more wilderness, eventually becoming the outer residential areas of Massachusetts.

I have a while to think about what I’m looking for.

My father didn’t finish his comic series - at least in published form. It was a big deal when he died that his story wasn’t finished. Lots of fans mourned his passing and sent gifts to my mother. However, there were an equal number of people who felt ripped off that there wasn’t a satisfying conclusion to a story that they had spent years following.

At the time I didn’t understand how these anonymous people on the internet could blame my father for not finishing his story. I mean, it’s not like he planned to die in a fiery plane crash. Realistically he couldn’t have had the story planned out, even in just the written outline form, more than a year ahead. His schedule was usually break-neck. He wrote for two months straight, then he storyboarded for about a month after that. He showed me one time when I asked how he did it. The storyboards were so rough they barely resembled my father’s masterful art.

But, the finished product was incredible. Thirty-two pages every month. That is how much work my father did. Eight issues per year. One volume every December in time for the holidays.

I understood these people’s frustration with an unfinished story now. Where they were upset that they didn’t have the definitive conclusion to a story that they loved, I was nervous that I would never be able to find out what the origin of the Vestige was, for personal reasons. If I didn’t know where it came from, how could I learn to harness its power completely? How could I insure that there weren’t more things like this out in the world?

Horrible ideas float through my head. Visions of other super-powered people using the power for personal gain. What if a corrupt politician got hold of the Vestige and used it to take control of the population? It was possible.

I shudder.

No wonder my father kept the thing hidden all these years, and hidden so well that even my mother never made mention of it. I wonder in the back of my mind if she knew that it even existed. If not, she has the best poker face I’ve ever seen.

I look out the window as the greenery gives way to the gray and blue of the city where I grew up. I feel a wave of relief wash over me.

This was where I belong. The anonymity of the city. There are people here. I can slip away without anyone watching. Unlike the tiny town library in Pine Grove where the librarians make a point to learn your name and what you are looking for, I can hide behind the vast numbers of people in Boston and try to keep my interest in the Vestige under the radar in case someone truly does figure out that it really exists.

The voice of the conductor sounds over the speakers, waking me from my musings.

“Next stop, North Station. The next stop is North Station.”

Then the recording takes over and a female voice instructs everyone to make sure that they have everything with them. Shortly after that we arrive at the station.

I throw my bag over my shoulder and exit the train, greeted by the industrial smell of concrete, exhaust, and sea air. Late April is still a perilous and unforgiving time in New England, with the remains of winter not completely gone. Everywhere there are puddles of melting snow, and the air, though not exactly frigid, is brisk when the wind picks up. I draw my sweatshirt jacket tighter over my chest and make my way inside through the station.

Down a few flights of steps and out the turn stiles, I make my way to the street exit where Mae is waiting for me.

15

Old Ghosts

“Glad to be back?” asks Mae as we walk down the street towards the business district.

“You have no idea,” I say with a smile on my face. It feels good to actually be talking face to face with her. I feel like I’m finally back with someone who truly understands me and doesn’t need to pry into things. “But, don’t make me too comfortable,” I continue. “My sentence isn’t up yet.”