First Superhero 1: The Second Super (3 page)

I shrugged. “I’m mostly just upset that he messed up all of our windows. It’s gonna be a pain putting them back up.”

Macy placed a hand on my arm and stopped walking. I did as well, my blood pressure going through the roof. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

I smiled. “Me too.”

Macy chuckled and so did I.

Feeling confident, I decided to keep the jokes going. “Hey, I’m perfectly content with only seeing Richter through a television screen.” Shit. That wasn’t a joke at all!

“I am too,” Macy said.

We reached the concession stand and I grabbed my fork. We turned around and headed back to the cots, totally oblivious to how ironic the conversation Macy and I had just had would be in just a few short days.

GENESIS

I
RETURNED HOME
as my father was making his walk back from the barn to the house, having just finished feeding the livestock. He wiped his arms on his muscular body and threw a smile my way.

“Hey,” I said as I closed my car door and started walking to the house.

“How was it?” he asked in a teasing voice, and I instantly knew he was talking about my time with Macy in particular.

My dad was only in his early forties, still young and with his best years ahead of him. He definitely didn’t look like the farming type, that’s for sure. When I was six, we moved from Indianapolis, where Dad had been a lawyer and Mom a teacher, to take over the family farm after my grandfather died. At first Dad was hesitant, but he fell in love with the farming life fast and swore he’d never go back to the city. Still, he looked out of place on a country farm. He still carried himself like the business lawyer he once was, always making sure his hair was cut and beard trimmed.

“It was good, I guess,” I said.

Dad chuckled. “You guess?” He shook his head as if to say
Ahhh, teenagers.

“Yeah.” We walked into the house and began taking off our shoes. “I mean, she’s not going to stay here forever. Eventually, her and her sister will have to move back up to Indy, and I’ll probably never see her again.”

“Not with that attitude, you won’t,” Dad said with a smile.

I rolled my eyes and walked through the living room to the stairs. “I’m going upstairs,” I announced as I made my way up. “Goodnight, guys!” I shouted.

Mom and Dad echoed their “goodnights,” and I got ready for the last few hours of sleep I was going to have before my life changed forever.

T
HE SCREAMS
of my mother woke me from my sleep. I jumped out of bed, grabbed a pair of sweatpants, and put them on as I scrambled down the hallway.

“Shut up!” The yell of a man’s voice I didn’t recognize stopped me in my tracks.

We were being robbed.

“Look, we don’t have anything valuable. Our livestock is the only things of worth. Just leave my wife alone, and I’ll take you to them,” my dad said, pleading with the intruders.

“We don’t want your dumb cows,” a man said. “We want your money, jewelry, anything you got that can make us a pretty dime.”

I inched closer to the top of the stairwell and peeked down. There was nobody at the bottom, but if I wanted to see what was going on, I’d have to go halfway down the stairs, as that’s where the opening to the first floor began.

“You aren’t listening to me,” my dad said. “We don’t have anything.”

“You’re telling me that you haven’t bought this pretty lady—” my mom began whimpering “—a diamond ring? A pearl necklace?” The intruder’s tone was condescending and rhetorical.

I inched down the stairs one-by-one, being as quiet as possible.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you,” Dad answered.

It wasn’t true at all. My mom had more money than she knew what to do with, and there was a safe hidden in the closet with over twenty grand. The farm wasn’t bringing in that kind of cash, Dad just had plenty of money left over from his lawyer days, plus Grandpa left a lot of money with the farm.

But our intruder didn’t know that, and Dad wasn’t going to tell him if he could help it. He was an ex-lawyer, he’d mastered making people do what he wanted.

I reached the point of the stairs where the first floor met the second, and peered around the corner. Most of the lights were off downstairs, save for the one in the kitchen, which was across the wide-open living room/den area. There were three intruders in total. One had a gun to Mom, another had a knife to Dad’s throat, and the one who I assumed was the leader stood between the four of them, facing my father.

“You got five seconds to tell me where the most valuable thing in this house is, or else I start searching myself.” The intruder whipped out a butterfly knife and walked over to Mom. Her long, blonde hair was a mess. She did her best to hold her composure. “Maybe I’ll find something valuable here,” he said as he pressed the knife flat against Mom’s cheek.

She whimpered, but bit her lip to keep from crying out. Her terror-filled eyes watched the knife blade as it traveled to her neck.

“Or here,” the leader said with a smile.

My dad fought against the man holding him back, but the leader pressed the knife deeper into Mom’s skin. I watched in horror as she cried out in pain.

“Nah-ah-ah,” the leader said, grinning from ear to ear. “Am I getting warmer?” The knife moved down further.

A hand grabbed my shoulder, and I let out a scream. I looked down, and the toothy grin of a large man looked up at me. I was so distracted by Mom, I didn’t even notice a fourth member of the gang sneaking up on me.

He pulled me down, and I fought against him, kicking and screaming, but my punches did nothing. He was a very large man, who laughed at my futility.

“Bingo,” the leader said, pointing his knife at me.

My dad was going ballistic, but the man restraining him kept his grip, not allowing my dad to escape.

“Be still or I will shoot your wife!” the leader shouted at Dad.

Dad must’ve believed him, because he stopped fighting.

I, on the other hand, did not. I struggled against the grip of my captor, but he wrapped his arms around me, restraining me. I tried kicking him, but it was no use.

The leader walked over to me and got right up in my face. He wore a ski mask, but I could still see his evil eyes, and the body odor emanating from his body. His breath, however, smelled of baking soda and mint. A stark contrast from the rest of his body, and a smell I became very familiar with as he leaned in close.

“Do you want me to hurt your mommy?” he asked in a babyish voice. “Your daddy?”

I said nothing. I was fuming. Livid. I wanted nothing more than to tear this monster apart. If looks could kill, I’d already killed this dude a thousand times over. My eyes were shooting daggers into his, and I wished they were real.

“You’re going to tell me where the money is, aren’t you, son?”

The fact that he called me “son” made me want to kill him even more.

“Don’t do it,” my dad told me.

I looked at him, confused. Was all this really worth saving a few thousand dollars?

Police coming,
he mouthed.

Relief washed over me. There was hope. Dad must’ve called them before the intruders got him.

I turned my eyes back to the leader, confidence radiating from me. “Get the hell out of my house,” I told him.

The leader let out a bellowing laugh. He leaned back, placing a hand on his chest, laughing as hard as he could. When he leaned back down, however, he brought his knife down deep into my thigh.

I let out a scream as the pain seared through me. My dad shouted in anger, and my mom screamed in fear.

Anger swelled within me, and that’s when it all began.

I kicked the leader as hard as I could in the chest. He turned into a rag doll and flew across the room, through the kitchen, and slammed into the kitchen sink, causing pipes to break and water to shoot in the air.

I turned my torso and threw the man restraining me to the right, and he went flying through the air and slammed into the brick wall, slumping to the ground.

The man who had a gun to Mom began to realize what just happened, and pointed the gun toward me. Even though he was on the other side of the room, my instinct was to dive at him, so dive I did. I pushed myself off the ground and cleared the length of the room. I reached out, and slammed into the henchman before he even knew what was going on. The two of us fell to the ground hard. I pushed myself up, but the man I tackled stayed down.

I turned around to get the man who had Dad, but Dad was one step ahead of me. He’d used my distraction, and had taken his captor down. He was on top of him, punching him over and over again, his hands as much of a bloody mess as his captor’s face. Finally Mom pulled him off the man, and the three of us came together in a warm embrace.

Police sirens sounded in the distance, better late than never.

Cold water reached my feet, and I let out a sharp hiss in surprise. The three of us looked to where the leader of the group sat in what was left of our kitchen sink, groaning in pain.

Mom and Dad looked at me with so many questions in their eyes, to which I knew the answer to none.

“I don’t know,” I said before they could ask. “I just don’t know.”

THE SECOND SUPER

I
CLOSED
the car door behind me as Dad and I pulled into the hardware store. There were a lot of things we had to get in order to fix the damage done both by the intruders we’d had last night, and by Richter.

Both Mom and Dad thought it’d be good for us to get right to work on the repairs, in order to best take our minds off the events of the day before. Unsurprisingly, I found this very difficult.

Dad got out of the car, and we began walking into the store. The two of us were deep within our own thoughts. Even in the car ride up to the store, we didn't speak. We were both so confused and scared. Not just from the fact that our lives had been threatened and the safety of our homes destroyed, but the way that I'd taken them out.

We'd all come to the conclusion that it was some really intense adrenaline. It made sense. Fight or flight. Like how people are able to lift cars to save loved ones trapped beneath them. If adrenaline could allow someone to lift a car that weighed tons, it'd definitely allow an in-shape seventeen-year-old to kick a hundred-and-seventy-five pound-man across a room, especially when the lives of his family were being threatened.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out as Dad opened the door and I walked into the store. A text from Drew was on the screen, and it read:

Dude! You gotta get to the school. There's a news crew here covering the shelter. CAMERAS EVERYWHERE!

I surprised myself when I smiled and chuckled a little.

“What is it?” Dad asked as we walked down one of the plumbing aisles of the hardware store.

I shook my head. “Drew. There's a local station at the high school covering the shelter, and he’s freaking out.”

Dad shook his head and smiled. “It's a local news station, I don't get what he's freaking out about.”

“Because it's Drew, and he finds a way to get excited and freak out about everything.”

“I guess that's not a bad way of looking at life.” Dad stopped in the aisle and turned to look at the water faucets. “You wanna run up there real quick when we're done here?” he asked as he searched for a faucet he thought would satisfy Mom.

I nodded. “Yeah, that'd be cool. It'd be nice to see Drew and them, plus tell them what went on last night. Wouldn't want them to find out through a newspaper or something.”

Dad snapped a picture of a faucet with his phone and sent it to Mom for approval. “Alright, sounds good,” he said as we stood there waiting. “I could use the distraction.”

I wanted to say “me too,” but the words didn't come out. I just grunted and nodded my head. I looked to the ground, trying to contain my excitement at the idea of a distraction.

Mom approved the faucet, and after another hour or so of shopping, we were loaded up in the truck, on our way to the high school.

When we pulled up, however, we noticed that for some reason everybody—including the news crew—were looking up.

“What in the world?” Dad asked as he parked the truck and the two of us got out.

We followed everyone's gaze to see what was going on, and when we saw, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Hovering ten feet above Ebon High School was Richter, his blue eyes glowing bright in the early afternoon sun.

I opened my mouth to say something, but no words came out. Everybody in the parking lot, including Dad and I, stood in awe of him. The sensible thing to do would be to turn and run away, but nobody had it in them. It’s not like we’d be able to get away, anyways, so we just stood there, terrified, trying to figure out if he’d show mercy on us or not.

He wasn’t.

Without saying a word, he floated down to the edge of the roof top, and from behind the half-wall that surrounded the edge of the roof, he pulled a young woman up by the back of her neck. She screamed in terror as Richter floated into the air and hovered over the edge of the high school, dangling the woman four stories in the air.

“Somebody help, please!” she screamed. I may have not been able to recognize her from afar, but that voice combined with the red hair left no doubt in my mind.

Richter was holding Macy in his clutches, and was about to drop her to her death.

My stomach twisted and heat flushed through my body. I look around, frantic for something—anything—to help her. But I was helpless.

The feeling in my gut grew stronger, and I felt a small vibration reverberate through the ground.

“Kane,” my dad said in a quiet voice. It sounded like he would say more, so I turned to look at him. Besides myself, he was the only in the person not looking at Richter and Macy. Instead, he was looking at the gravel floating inches above the ground around my feet.

Startled, I jumped back and the rocks fell to the ground. The vibrations stopped, and I met eyes with my dad, not believing what we’d just seen.

A high-pitched scream pierced the air, as everybody gasped in horror. I turned to look, and I screamed in horror as I saw Macy falling toward the ground.