Super Human (3 page)

With a trace of amusement in his voice, Paragon said, “I could hand you over to the security guards here.”

“We’re outside the mall,” Lance said. “They’re only allowed to make arrests inside.”

“So you know the law. Good for you. How about I hold on to you long enough for your parents to come looking? How’s that sound?”

“Sounds like kidnapping.” Inwardly, Lance relaxed. There was no way that was going to happen. “And my folks won’t miss me for
hours
, ’cos they’re sick at home with the flu. You really think that this is a good use of your time? Surely there’s some real crooks out there that you could be bothering instead.”

“Leave. Don’t come back.”

Lance allowed his shoulders to sag, tried to look defeated. “OK, OK. I’m going.” He sighed and turned away. He muttered “jerk” under his breath, deliberately loud enough for Paragon to hear—he didn’t want the superhero to know how relieved he felt. The situation could have turned out a lot worse.

Red-faced, he pushed through the cheering crowd. Everyone would remember him now: He’d never be able to work this mall again. But there were other malls, and there was also the tourist district downtown. Tourists were easier to scam anyway.

From behind, Lance heard the whine of Paragon’s jetpack kick into action, and glanced back to see the armored hero slowly rise into the air.

The crowd clapped and hollered. It wasn’t every day that a superhero showed up in a small town like Fairview.

What’s he doing here anyway?
Lance asked himself.
Have the supervillains all got the flu too or something?

Then the jetpack’s whining grew closer, and Lance was buffeted by the blast as Paragon passed close overhead.

The armored hero touched down in front of him, and stood with his arms folded. “Forgotten something?”

“Um...”

“The money.” Paragon extended his gloved hand.

Reluctantly, Lance reached into his pocket and handed over a roll of bills. “There. Happy now?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, kid,” Paragon said. He flipped through the bills. “This is your decoy roll, a bunch of ones wrapped up in a twenty. Where’s the rest of it?”

Someone in the crowd went “Oooh!” and sparked a ripple of light laughter.

“Go on,” Paragon said. “Be a good citizen and make a charitable donation.”

Another member of the crowd shouted, “Get a receipt, kid! It might be tax-deductible!” which triggered an even bigger laugh.

Yeah, that’s hilarious.
Lance could feel his cheeks burning as he passed back through the crowd with Paragon following close behind. A few snide comments were thrown his way, but he knew this wasn’t the right time to respond.

The girl with the collecting tin smiled at him as he approached. If she’d been a crotchety old woman, it would have been bad enough, but she was young and pretty and cheerful.

Lance dug deep into his other pocket and took out his real roll of bills, handed it all over to the girl. “Happy now?” he said to Paragon. “Can I go, or do you have to humiliate me even more?”

“You think
this
is humiliation? Consider yourself lucky you’re not being arrested. Go on, get lost. But you just remember this next time you get the urge to rip people off.”

Lance turned away, but the girl reached out and took hold of his arm. “Wait, wait!”

Oh, what
now
?

She pinned a tiny paper flag to the lapel of Lance’s jacket.

Almost three hundred miles to the north, fifteen-year-old Roz Dalton felt her stomach clench in protest as the customized Bell 222B helicopter dipped and swerved and swooped over the landscape.

She did her best to pay attention to her older brother and not think about how embarrassing it would be to throw up all over the floor. She’d never had a fear of flying until about a year earlier, when her brother insisted that it was time she learned. Then she started to have nightmares about the copter’s engine suddenly cutting out while she was at the controls.

Her aviophobia had eased a little in the past couple of months, but she still knew she’d never be comfortable with sitting inside a wingless metal box that weighed over two tons and flew at one hundred and fifty miles per hour.

Roz was slim with lightly tanned skin and black hair that until recently had reached most of the way down her back. Now it was so short it was almost a crew cut. She liked it better this way: It was easier to manage and took only a few minutes to wash and dry.

Her brother Max was five years older. He was of average height and had a slim waist with a disproportionately large upper body, the result of far too many gymnasium hours on the pull-up bars and not enough on the rest of the equipment. Max had the same dark hair and piercing brown eyes as Roz, a family trait they’d inherited from their late mother.

They both wore matte-black two-piece uniforms made from a lightweight bulletproof material that Max was in the process of patenting.

“We’ll be going in fast,” Max was saying to Roz. “We don’t know who these people are or what they can do. And after last month’s debacle I don’t want you taking any risks. Got that?”

Roz nodded. The knot in her stomach tightened as she recalled the battle, and she unconsciously rubbed her left arm just above the elbow: A violent but low-powered supervillain called Gladius had slashed at her with his sword, coming within an inch of removing her forearm. The wound had left a deep scar that Roz just knew was going to be permanent.

Accompanying Roz and Max in the copter were three members of Max’s support team: Oliver French, Antonio Lashley, and Stephen Oxford. Unlike the Daltons, Ollie, Lash, and Ox were ordinary humans, but they were former U.S. Army Rangers, highly trained in hand-to-hand combat, weapons use, strategies, and survival.

Sitting next to Roz was the white-clad superhero Quantum. He was about Max’s age, but tall and lean. Most of his face was hidden under his mask, and Roz sometimes envied his anonymity: Superheroes like Quantum and Titan didn’t have to worry about everyone recognizing them when they were off duty.

Max, however, had never hidden the fact that he was superhuman—and because everyone knew who he was, there had seemed little point in Roz hiding her own identity.

Quantum nudged Roz with his elbow. “You all right, Rosalyn?” He was one of the very few people who called her by her full name, but despite that she still liked him.

She shrugged. “I’m fine.”

This was only Roz’s fourth official mission. Her superhuman abilities had begun to develop four years earlier, but Max had always kept her at home with their younger brother Josh. Much as Roz had hated being left behind, she had never complained.

“Whatever happened to that boyfriend of yours?” Quantum asked. “Someone with his abilities could be pretty useful on a mission like this.”

“I think you’re confusing me with someone else,” Roz said. She tried to keep her expression neutral. It hurt that she’d had only one relationship and it hadn’t lasted very long.

“No, I’m certain it was you. You were seeing that guy who could—”

Max loudly cleared his throat, interrupting them. “If you two are done? Thank you. The Midway power plant is due to go online next month,” Max said, unrolling a map of the target area. “That’s almost three months ahead of schedule, but I’m told that the safety checks were all in the green as of this morning. They’ve only got a minimum complement of security and staff.”

“How many are we up against?” Quantum asked, peering at the map.

“Unknown.” Max tapped the map with a gloved forefinger. “They crashed through the perimeter here in a stolen Securicor truck. Took out the guards and shot their way into the plant. We believe there are at least four of them still outside, using the truck as cover. We don’t know whether they’re trying to sabotage the plant or steal from it. Fact is, the reactor doesn’t have a core yet—there’s no plutonium for anyone to steal. We’ll be landing zero-point-five miles to the north. Quantum, you’ll scout ahead, let us know what we’re up against. Just keep to the perimeter—check out their defenses.”

Quantum nodded, then said, “I can phase myself through the walls and—”

“No,” Max interrupted. “We can’t take the risk. Remember Cádiz?”

Roz noted the exchange of looks between the two men, and she knew what it meant: On a recent mission to the Spanish city, the supervillain Termite had rigged a warning device that could detect when Quantum was using his ability to phase through solid objects—it had almost cost three hostages their lives.

“Until we can find a way to block that sort of detector, phasing yourself is off the table.” Max turned to his sister. “Roz, you hang back with the chopper until we have a better idea of what’s going on, understood?”

The pilot called, “Ninety seconds to target. Hold tight, I’m taking her down.”

The copter banked to the left and dropped sharply. Roz clutched the edges of her seat and tried not to lose her breakfast.

The swooping and lurching didn’t seem to bother the men at all. The Rangers were running a last-minute check on their weapons and body armor, and Max was pulling on his uniform’s matching helmet.

Ollie jumped up and slid open the door, and a blast of hot, dusty wind howled through the copter.

“Suit up, Roz,” Max shouted.

As Roz was picking up her helmet the copter lurched, dropped even more sharply. The helmet slipped from her grasp and rolled toward the door.

She reached for it with her mind, stopped its roll, lifted it up, and plucked it out of the air.

She looked up to see Quantum smiling at her. “Man, I wish I could do that!”

Roz’s telekinesis was almost second nature to her now. Just by concentrating, she could move almost any object, as long as it was in her line of sight. The size of the object didn’t seem to present any problem, but its mass did. So far, she hadn’t been able to lift anything heavier than her own weight.

Her helmet wavered in the air as the copter touched down with a bump. Max yelled, “Quantum—Go!”

The speedster vanished.

Half a mile there and back,
Roz thought.
How long is that going to—

Roz jumped: Quantum was suddenly standing in front of her. He picked up the map, snatched a pencil from Ox’s hand, and began marking Xs and circles on the map. “Eight on the outside. Four here, two here, two over this side. At least three more on the way out through the doors, heading this way.” He drew an arrow on the map. “The gate and wall provide them with cover here and here, but the terrain shelters us from their view up to about here. . . .” He drew a larger circle, then wiped the sweat from his upper lip on the back of his glove. “The men are armed with HK11Es, looked like. Standard lightweight body armor, all gray. No insignia that I could see. Max, there’s not one of them under thirty and they look like they know what they’re doing.”

“Good work,” Max said. “You . . . Quantum, you’re sweating.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty hot in here.” He swayed a little.

Max grabbed his arm to steady him. “Ollie?”

The Ranger stepped up to Quantum, put one hand on each side of the speedster’s face, and tilted his head back. “Can’t see too much without taking off his mask, but he looks sick, Max.” He pressed his thumbs under Quantum’s jaw. “Yeah, glands feel a little swollen. You’re sitting this one out, kid.”

Quantum brushed Ollie’s hands away. “Forget it. I feel a little woozy, but I’ll be fine.”

Ollie steered him back to the seat next to Roz. “No way. I’m the medic; you do what I say.”

Max pulled on a camouflage jacket over his uniform. “If it passes, come and find us.”

Quantum nodded.

“All right, let’s do this.” Max leaped out first, followed by the Rangers.

Roz watched as the team split into two pairs, each pair skirting around opposite sides of a low fern-covered hill. The men dropped to the ground and began to crawl forward. Beyond the hill she could see the tops of the power plant’s enormous cooling towers.

She was more concerned now that Quantum wasn’t with them. He wasn’t officially a part of Max’s team, but they had worked together on a few missions and he was a great asset.

He doesn’t look good,
Roz thought.

Her concern must have shown on her face: Quantum smiled weakly and said, “That’s one problem with being superfast—I get sick a lot quicker than normal people.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “But I heal quicker too. I hope.”

Roz could do nothing but sit and wait. She’d been expecting that anyway, but with Quantum out of action, the success of the mission was now less certain than when Max had planned it.

Quantum moaned softly, and Roz saw that his eyes and nose were streaming.

Roz jumped from her seat and leaned next to Ernie Wieberg, the pilot. “We have to get him to a doctor.”