Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (22 page)

“Did you get a sub for the paper route?” he
asked.

“I did,” she said.

“Call them back. Cancel. I need to go
out.”

She stared at him. “Honey it's January.
You're not feeling well and there are two inches of snow on the
ground. I don't need you sliding on your bike and falling in
someone's front yard and freezing to death.” They finally arrived
home.

He looked at her. “Wait a second.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“You mean that if I fell off my bike-”

“You
know
what I mean. I'm worried
about you!”

“-nobody in this town would come and help me
out?”

“Michael-”

“They're just going to let me freeze to death
right in front of their house or their neighbor's house?”

“Michael Edward!” she snapped.

“I might as well not walk to school, or take
my bike to school either. The roads are
treacherous
. In fact
I could just stay in the house and learn everything by
computer.”

“We don't know who we can trust here. We
haven't lived here forever.”

“My whole life isn't that long.”

“The face people show you in public isn't the
same one they wear at home,” she blurted out. “People keep secrets
here, Michael. It's a small town, they always do.”

“Like you and Grandpa?”

He'd gone too far. The realization struck him
like a slap, his mother didn't even have to. The look they shared
was electric, full of warning bells and the frightened urge to run
away from her. So he did, back to the garage to grab his bike.

By the time he got back to the porch she was
inside, probably calling one of her Tupperware party friends to
talk about what a horrible son she had. He threw the papers into
his neon, reflective newspaper sack and got the bike moving.

All throughout the ride he couldn't stop
thinking about what he'd say to Lily. He'd sort of grown apart from
her when he started to make friends with Charlotte, but she still
said hi to him and still smiled at him. He felt guilty for not
talking to her, but only a bit. She was just another customer. Who
was pretty. And nice. And got him interested in lots of awesome
books.

He definitely did not think about his mother,
and how she was going to steal him away from his life here. And how
she was keeping things from him. Focus, he told himself. Focus on
what's important. You need to have a plan, and you need to have
help.

He'd gone over the start of his conversation
with her a few dozen times by the time he actually got to the
library and stomped on the welcome mat to clear the snow off his
boots. She was there, still with a halo of gold blonde hair tied in
a very cute ponytail, still with the business clothes, suit coat
and matching skirt.

“Hey Michael,” she said. “You okay? Looking a
little peaky right now.”

“I had a migraine at school today,” he said.
“Had to go to the hospital.”

“Ooh, sucky. You okay then? Clean bill of
health for Mr. Michael Washington?”

“Yeah,” he started to stare at his shoes, and
realized he was being a dork. “Hey listen, can I, are you busy
right now? Because I need to talk to somebody about something.”

The smile dropped immediately. He hoped he
hadn't just made a huge mistake.

“What's up?”

“I...not here. You have those study rooms
right? The ones nobody uses?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The soundproof ones. Funny
you think nobody ever uses them.”

She led him over toward the empty study
rooms. There were two, just little boxes with a window, blinds on
the window, a table, two chairs, a reading lamp, and a lame poster
about how cool reading was. Nobody read books with that look on
their faces.

“Okay…what's up?” she asked.

“Can you, um, shut the door?”

She did. Michael gathered up his courage and
his breath at the same time. He wanted to tell the whole story as
quickly as possible. He didn't want to leave anything out, but he
knew he was going to forget things.

He tried to tell her the whole thing in one
breath, from Trent up to the dreams he'd had in the Marcus
Patterson gym, and how he somehow knew they weren't dreams (mostly
because of the cigarettes...he wouldn't have believed about the
cigarettes, and that would have made the whole things just a
dream). But it was real in real life, so they all had to be
true.

In the end he told her about the suspicions
he had about Mr. Jackson and the thing he'd overheard, the Omega
Syndicate. Only when he finished did he see how stupid it all
sounded.

He waited for Lily to laugh at him, to give
him a slap on the back or an affectionate punch in the shoulder and
tell him 'good one' and that April Fools' day wasn't for another
two months and change.

If she had, he might have laughed and tried
to forget the whole thing, to put it down to his own failing mind,
and ask his mom to let him see one of his Grandpa's psychologist
teams. But in the end she didn't do any of that.

Instead, she looked at him with a face more
serious than he'd seen before, arms folded across her chest, and
nodded.

“You're ready then,” she said.

In the break room, she pressed a combination
of buttons on the coffee maker, and the wall with the coat rack
slid aside. Revealed was a staircase leading down into darkness,
and at the end was something he couldn’t quite make out, only that
it was lit by halogen bulbs somewhere far beneath the library.

Apparently the architect behind the public
library had been a paranoid nutcase, because he (or she, let’s be
fair) didn't just design it with an underground bunker to keep out
fallout from nuclear blasts. The architect didn't just include the
heating system that was tied into thermal vents from deep within
the earth's crust. It wasn't just built with water and air
purification systems, so that a dedicated army of moles could
survive down there indefinitely. There was also light absorbing
fungus under glass, which glowed in the dark, so they could
conserve power, and a curious bank of stationary bikes along one
wall.

Lily led him around, watching his face
carefully.

The whole thing looked like a secret
headquarters, which he guessed it was. He wondered briefly if the
Omega Syndicate had just stolen him without a fight at all. Then he
considered that this was Lily, the same Lily who told him about
soppy romance novels he’d never read, the ones with oily
bodybuilders on every cover.

“Michael, you probably got an echo of Mr.
Jackson’s power,” Lily explained.

“Huh?”

“You said that Mr. L used his ability on you,
and he’s together with Mr. Jackson quite a lot. There was probably
some residual mind control or telepathy when he gave you the other
powers.”

“You think so?”

“Yep.”

Michael spotted something out of the corner
of his eye.

“What is that?” he asked. He was afraid that
Mrs. Susanna Washington had been right about Mrs. Sulzsko and she
visited the library's underground marijuana farm.

“Hydroponics,” Lily said. “You can actually
grow plants down here with just UV lights and water, did you know
that? We have soil, but you don't really need it.”

“And the bikes?”

She handed him a flashlight. It was one of
those ones you pump up several times.

“I don't get it.”

“The bikes are bigger versions of this.” She
explained how you could cycle up the generator every day with four
people working 3-4 hours each, or sixteen people working an hour
each. Good for the body, good for the community.

“And our generator will work for two days
between recharging, if we conserve power a bit.”

“This is so...wow,” he said.

Another of the librarians was down there, but
he was an old guy with finger-in-the-electric-socket hair around
the back of his head, while the top was billiard ball shiny. He was
staring down his nose through a pair of half-moon glasses at some
clipboards tacked to one of the walls.

“Right,” Lily said. “Here's Zeus.”

“Zeus,” Michael said.

“Keeper of the thunderbolt,” she said. “Hi
Mr. Z.”

Mr. Zeus (that couldn't be his real name)
grunted. Michael hadn’t noticed before, but there were a bunch of
clear glass sticks hanging on the wall just behind this Zeus guy.
Each stick had a clipboard next to it. He took a long look at one
of the clear glass sticks on the wall next to the clipboard and
grunted again. Then he took it off the wall and turned it.

“What's going on?” Lily asked, much more
brightly than usual. Bright enough that Michael could tell she was
worried.

“Trouble,” Mr. Z said.

When he turned, Michael saw that he had a
wireless headset in his ear. Mr. Z grunted again, then looked at
Lily. With a flip of the head towards Michael and an arch of the
eyebrows, he asked a question without asking at all.

“Michael Washington. He's real concerned
about his mom and dad, and his grandfather. So I thought I'd...I
thought...” She trailed off. “Let's head back upstairs
Michael.”

The glass stick said UNSTABLE on it in big
blocky yellow letters. And the name on the clipboard was-

“Hey, no!” he shouted. “Why's my mom's name
down here on this wall?”

It hadn't seemed as interesting before, but
now he could make out names on the other clipboards. Terrence
Jackson was one, and Mary-Ann Lansing was another. He guessed that
was Archibald Lansing's wife. There were well over thirty spanning
the wall, each with a glass stick hanging next to it. Terrence
Jackson's stick unbelievably read STABLE in lying green
letters.

“Michael, let's go,” Lily said. Now she
sounded a little scared.

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Mr. Z grunted and went to another clipboard,
then wrote a note on the attached paper.

“Listen, I just wanted to show you the
hydroponic farm and the generators, you know, and, and, maybe give
you a spin on the generator bikes. I wasn't thinking-”

Mr. Z said “Yep,” and penciled in another
note on another board.

“You tell me what you're doing with my mom's
name there, and I'll go. Simple as that.”

Lily looked over at Mr. Z, who ignored her,
and back to Michael. “Listen, I'm going to get in trouble as it is.
Please
Michael.”

“You've been really nice to me before,” he
said. “So I'm not going to ask you about all these other names. You
just tell me about this one, and no problem okay? What's the glass
stick for, and what is her name doing down here?” He wouldn't have
believed that it was a Bingo roster or a Tupperware party schedule
for a second, and he was glad when Lily gave in.

“It's her key,” she said. “The glass stick.
Your mom's one of the keys...we, uh, we follow her progress-”

“You
follow
her?”

“That came out wrong. We just watch to make
sure nothing goes wrong.”

“So you're watching her, and following
her.”

Lily squirmed and tried to look at anything
but him. She opened her mouth to speak, but Mr. Z exploded.

“NO!” he screamed. Not at he or
Lily...whoever was on the phone. “NO, YOU DO NOTHING, DO YOU HEAR
ME? ABSOLUTELY, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE ARE YOU TO APPROACH HER OR
INTERACT WITH HER IN ANY WAY! I SWEAR TO ALL THINGS HOLY THAT YOU
WILL DISAPPEAR OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH IF YOU LIFT A FINGER. DO
YOU UNDERSTAND THE DIRECT ORDER I HAVE JUST GIVEN YOU, AGENT? Of
course you do.” Pause. “No, I do not CARE if she is weeping herself
blind up there! If she gets a bottle of sleeping pills and swallows
every single one of them, YOU ARE TO DO NOTHING BUT REPORT TO ME!”
He swore in a rainbow of words Michael had never knew could go
together like that. Finally he ripped the headset from his ear and
yelled into it.

“YOU ARE INCHES AWAY FROM BEING TAKEN OFF
ASSIGNMENT, AGENT! The regents are going to hear about this.” Then
Michael watched as he smashed the headset against the floor and
stomped on it not one, not two, but three times.

Lily cleared her throat, and Mr. Z looked
up.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He went to a place in
the wall Michael would have sworn was a wall, opened it, and
retrieved a new headset. Then he cut the plastic case off and
fitted it into his ear. There was no trace of the fury he'd just
shown. This Mr. Z looked tired and a little sad as he crossed to a
dark doorway, flipped on a light, and motioned inside.

“Come,” he said.

It looked like an interrogation room from one
of those cop shows: one table, three chairs, bars on the table you
could be handcuffed to, gray paint on the walls, and a big mirror
over one wall. That was it. The whole room was designed to make you
feel like you weren't a part of the real world anymore, that you
were already in prison. It was about as personal as Mr. Z.

Zues staring at him across the table made him
want to go to the bathroom. Maybe to throw up, maybe not.

“There are more than forty individuals in
this town who we think of as Keys,” Mr. Z explained. “This is where
we keep track of them.”

“A Key,” Lily said, “is someone we think
could tip over the whole town.”

“I think you've said quite enough,” Mr. Z
snapped. Then he sighed. “Think of a shield, Michael. You put it on
your arm, and what does it do? It protects you. Only this town
doesn't have a shield. It has a hundred shields. And they're not
just shields. They're more like tame lions. When the lion likes you
or fears the whip, it will attack anybody that tries to harm you.
But it's pretty easy to let your guard down and have that lion bite
your arm off. Times a hundred. So we have a hundred crouching
lions, ready to be a shield against any danger to our little town
here, but we also have to watch that the shield doesn't eat
us.”

All Michael could manage to say was,
“Uh.”

“So you can see why I would rather you
not
be here
. But since you are, I’m afraid I have to make a call.
If you’ll excuse me.”