Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1)
Read Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) Online
Authors: Brent Meske
Tags: #series, #superhero, #stone, #comic, #super, #rajasthan, #ginger, #alpha and omega, #lincolnshire, #alphas, #michael washington, #kravens, #mckorsky, #shadwell, #terrence jackson
Super Nobody
Alphas and Omegas: Book One
Copyright Brent Meske, 2013
Smashwords edition
Smashwords Edition License Notes:
This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted,
reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without
alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.
This book is dedicated to Alfred Siegert and
Harold ‘Grampa Honey’ Meske, for being strong, gentle, patient,
kind, passionate, good cooks, good fathers, good teachers, good
grandfathers, and for giving me life, though it was years and years
down the road. I wish they were both here today so I could thank
them.
Super Nobody
Poink!
Michael was in sixth grade when he witnessed
his first kid going up in flames.
One of the biggest problems with being in
middle school is how quickly your friends turn on you. Michael knew
it well enough. All the athletic kids, all the normal ones who
didn’t bother to question their friendships, they were all well and
good. He wasn’t one of them. He also didn’t seem to grow quickly
enough either, because he was always picking up cute little names
like chopsticks, beanpole, string bean, twerp, geek, nerd. There
were plenty of others.
The smart kids wouldn’t have anything to do
with Michael. He was a magnet for abuse from the bigger kids. As
long as the geniuses at the Lincoln Area District Consolidated
Elementary Middle School (LADCEMS) stayed away from Michael, all of
them would head home at three o’clock with all their teeth,
ice-cream free hair, their underwear intact, all parts present and
accounted for.
Michael wasn’t nearly as lucky.
All his friends had drifted away as soon as
fifth grade hit. Some of them, like Richie Lewiston and Marc
Olenkiewicz suddenly developed muscles, joined sports teams, and
realized how much they had never really liked Michael to begin
with. Others like Jordie Munsen and Jeff McNulty moved to different
schools. Everybody else realized that Michael had shown up on the
seventh graders’ radars.
The first day of fifth grade ended up with
him getting hit in the head with a rubber dodge ball at lunchtime.
In the daze that followed, Michael wondered just how quickly his
friends could have disappeared. It was like everyone developed
invisibility or super speed as soon as the ball made that silly
poink
sound and the asphalt hit him on the other side of his
head. And the oddest thing was that dodge ball was happening a good
fifty yards away.
Two kids came over to grab the ball, already
laughing. One was a tall, powerfully built seventh grader with a
beaky nose and one of those bowl-over-the-head haircuts. As
ridiculous as his face looked, nobody looked past the arms much.
His name was Trent and he wore shirts two sizes too small.
“Man down! Man down!” the other kid laughed.
This one was almost as tall as Trent, but put together from all the
wrong parts. He had huge hands and feet, but comically thin arms
and legs. His body seemed too small, with his hands swinging down
around his knees, and a dopey face that seemed to be ears and not
much more. This thing was named Davey Rightman.
“Don’t call
that
a man,” Trent told
him. “Looks more like a popsicle stick with arms and legs.” He
grabbed Davey by the face and pushed him away. He staggered, still
laughing, as Trent bent down and jerked Michael to his feet. He
bent down, quite a ways, and looked Michael in the eyes. Then he
brushed some invisible dirt off Michael’s shirt.
Michael was aware that most of the kids on
the playground had stopped playing, and a crowd was watching
intently. It was sort of eerie the expectant and hushed way they
were staring. This had to happen to somebody, and in the hot early
September air, everyone else was hoping, hoping against hope that
it wouldn’t be them. They were all secretly hoping Michael would
have that huge target painted on his chest. Whether they felt
guilty about wishing this on him or not, he couldn't see any help
coming.
“Unlucky,” Trent said. Michael’s vision was
still swimming a bit, and his head was surely the size of a beach
ball. It contained that much pain anyhow.
“Cough up,” Davey said. He was finally back
next to Trent.
“Huh?” Michael asked at last.
“Trent here helped you up. Brushed the dirt
off you. Made you presentable.”
“No way to make you look presentable,” Trent
said conversationally.
“Well,” Davey said, “As much as he could. Fee
for presentable is ten bucks.”
Michael’s mind whirled in confusion and pain.
“Huh?”
“Got us a smart one here,” Trent muttered.
“What’s your name kid?”
“Michael,” he said.
“Michael,” Trent said. “You’re in…what…third
grade?”
He was dimly aware that they were making fun
of him. At last he said, “Fifth.”
They shared a look of surprise, and then
Davey burst out into high-pitched laughter. Trent grinned, and
Davey took over the interrogation.
“Last name, fifth grade Michael?”
“Washington,” he said.
“Michael Washington, fifth grade. Put your
hands in your pockets.”
Michael could do that. He did.
“Pull out what’s in there,” Davey said.
“What? No!” he said. Understanding had hit
him like a dodge ball.
Poink
!
Trent just stared at him for a few moments.
Then he straightened, shrugged, and turned to walk off.
“I were you, I’d find a good funeral home,”
Davey said before he, too walked off. Everybody was still staring
at him, like those red dots from scopes in the video games.
It was done. Nuclear Launch Detected.
School that day didn’t matter. It was only
the first day and none of the teachers were saying anything
important. There wasn’t going to be any homework. The laws of karma
and public elementary school required this. No reason not to dwell
on his death. He did this throughout the last two hours of school,
thinking about how many of them there would be, and how long it
would take. Would he be able to scream? He doubted it.
They caught up to him on the way home.
Actually, it wasn’t just Trent and Davey. He was walking home in a
massive group of other kids, varying grades and an array of
heights, when he realized he was surrounded by a bunch of taller,
meaner looking kids. Davey was one of these.
He smiled, which made his head seem all teeth
instead of all ears. “Let’s head across Wilson, kiddo.” With that,
a pair of hands grabbed him and began hauling him across the busy
street, away from the kids all walking home.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey!”
Davey’s fist looped around in a wide arc and
walloped him in the stomach. All the air left him, and what was
worse, no more air was coming in. He couldn’t make himself breathe.
He was floating in space, eyes bugging out, choking on nothing.
Gradually, through the pain and the fear,
Michael realized Trent was in front of him, and that huge hand was
on Michael's jaw. He was being carefully inspected.
“You didn’t hit him in the face.”
“Course not,” Davey said, from far away.
“Good.” He turned his attention on Michael.
“You’re gonna bring me ten bucks,” he said. “Right?”
Michael nodded miserably. When he tried to
close his eyes and block out the sight of Trent’s gorilla face
above him, the seventh grader slapped him lightly.
“Eyes on me. And tomorrow, at lunch, you come
bring it to the dodge ball court. Give it to me front of everybody.
You got me?” Trent's little posse was laughing. Other kids were
watching as they walked slowly by. He was reminded of heading up
north one year to visit some relatives, seeing a semi truck on its
side and another car crumpled up nearby, with police milling
everywhere. Traffic had just about stopped in both directions,
which had made his father swear under his breath in a way Michael
had never forgotten. Only now he was the wrecked car, and Trent was
the semi truck...only not on his side.
Michael’s face burned with humiliation and
shame. Mostly it was fear. A couple of light slaps brought him back
face to face with Trent.
“Answer me.”
“Yeah,” he gasped at last. His ability to
breathe was returning.
“You tell any teachers or parents or
whatever, I’ll know,” Trent said, and grabbed a handful of skin,
pinching him and causing him to gasp in agony.
Michael nodded miserably. He understood.
“Now, there you go. Two yeses in a row. That
wasn’t so hard.” He pulled Michael to his feet and slugged him in
the exact same place Davey had hit him. He felt his shoes leave the
ground, and then he was on his side, his face on the grass and the
rest of him on the sidewalk. He was a fish out of water.
“Never tell me no again, got it?” Trent said
over his shoulder.
Michael spent most of his fifth grade year
doing two things: delivering papers so he could make Trent's weekly
payments, and saving up for a bike to take him back home faster.
Most days he could rocket out of school, be on his bike, and be
near his house before Trent and Davey and the other jerks could
even ask where he was.
His paper route actually turned out to be a
huge blessing in disguise. He had to deliver a paper to the library
every day, which wasn't really cool since it was well out of the
way and he had to cross a really busy street. It was cool, however,
once he stopped to ask for the library's money and the woman behind
the counter gave him a free e-reader.
She wasn't the type of librarian he had seen
in a pair of movies, the ones who were steel-haired hags with gold
chains attached to their spectacles (these ones were so old they
didn't even use the right word: glasses) and flower print dresses
with doilies attached. This librarian was a blonde-haired goddess
who left the top two blouse buttons undone and who had to chide
several men every day for asking her go up the ladders to get some
books they really didn't need. Her name was Lily, he knew it by the
nametag: I'M HERE TO HELP!!! MY NAME IS Lily.
He had noticed a pair of kids clicking on a
huge digital music player, and sneered at them just as Lily gave
him the money in a little envelope, just like always.
“You shouldn't get down on them just for
wanting to read,” Lily said.
“Huh?” he asked. “Read?”
“Sure,” Lily said. “E-readers.”
Oh yeah, his grandfather had a tablet at home
and was always scrolling on the thing, reading the news and
whatnot.
“But it's not a tablet. No touch screen or
anything.”
“They're the old versions,” Lily explained.
And he drifted off into her blue-gray eyes while she explained
about the buttons and the long battery life, even though they were
over thirty years old. A ton had been donated to the library when
the tablets got more popular.
“You want to try one out?” she asked.
“But...I don't have any money.”
“They're free. I'll just need your home phone
so if you don't return it, I can come and get you in the night.”
She winked and smiled. Some sleeping part of Michael stirred. He
didn't understand it yet, and wouldn't for another few years. By
then, of course, Lily would be dead and everything would be out of
control.
But nobody knew the future, nobody Michael
knew, and he would be able to see her and talk to her every time he
finished a book. He just told her what to write down on the
paperwork, and she handed him a white square thing with a leather
case.
“There you go,” she said. “In two weeks, the
Hobbit is going to delete itself and the reader will call me to
tell me where it is. So just bring it back in if you don't like
it.”