Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (29 page)

Michael crept inside and called Charlotte's
house. There was no answer, either because Mrs. Sulszko and the
kids were hiding or because they'd joined Mr. L's zombie army.
Charlotte wasn't there, or she'd be answering. He didn't bother to
leave a message. His hands were shaking as he hung up.

Police sirens rang out in the distance, and a
few gunshots sounded like weak fireworks. There was a glow over to
the south, which Michael discovered was a fire when the blaring
yell of the fire trucks sounded. He wondered if somebody had been
smoking when they were taken, or if they just left the oven on.

“The oven!” he shouted, and ran to turn it
off. He pulled it open and immediately fell back as a choking bunch
of black smoke rolled out. The smoke alarm started to squeal while
he hacked and coughed the rancid stench of blackened casserole out
of his lungs. Terror siezed him. If they heard it, they would come,
and they would find him. He couldn't be found, it wasn't possible.
After a while he crawled to the broom closet, yanked out something
long enough to do the job, and smashed the smoke alarm until the
plastic housing was destined for the recycle bin. Finally, he
dragged a chair to the center of the kitchen and, still retching
and coughing, yanked the battery free. Silence took over.

This was the worst he had ever felt in his
life. With his eyes stinging, his throat and nose raw and feeling
scratched all the way down to his stomach, and the lost feeling of
hopelessness overwhelming him. Back to the kitchen wall, he let the
tears come. He coughed and cried at the same time. There was no one
to watch him. No jerks like Trent or Davey Rightman, nobody he
wanted to impress like Charlotte or Grandpa or Lily, no one he
should be strong for, like his mom. There was nobody. He might as
well be on another planet.

With no plan, no hope, and nowhere safe to
go, Michael felt like a hollow husk. He felt like he'd tried, he'd
done all he could, and it still wasn't good enough. Only now there
was no teacher he could ask for an extension. He couldn't appeal to
his mother to help him finish on time. He had failed before he even
knew who the real bad guy was.

At least he felt there was nothing worse than
this.

It was another few hours before Michael's
stomach began to remind him that this situation wasn't the end of
the world. He had to eat, but the kitchen was a black, horrid
smelling mess. For a few minutes he was terrified of his mother
coming back and finding it like this, and when he finally
remembered she wasn't coming back, he felt even worse. He couldn't
remain in the kitchen like this, not even to use the microwave on
his favorite thing in the whole world: canned ravioli in meat
sauce. Still, the thought of ravioli made his stomach threaten to
mutiny.

At first, he was scared even to set foot out
of his own door, not knowing if Mr. L had sentries set up to catch
stragglers who were just walking around. After a few backyards and
careful looks, he determined that the coast was clear. He went back
and got his bike. Once he decided that nobody was going to be
around town, he had pretty free reign over the streets. He would
have anyway, since dawn was on the approach, but he didn't see a
soul. Even the restaurants wouldn't have anybody in them. He hopped
on his bike and rode slowly through back streets until he came to
the local McDonald's. Even at this hour, whatever hour that was, it
was still shining in all its fluorescent glory. He checked for any
roving bands of neighborhood zombies and darted inside.

It was the inside of McDonald's that did it.
It didn't matter if it was dark or not, people should have been
inside, cooking up something unhealthy to serve to whoever was
there. Once his father was home for several weeks, and he made it a
point to take Michael out fishing. Well, aside from breaking his
dad's favorite fly rod and getting a stern talking to, the only
thing they did that was interesting at all was go to 'the Mac' as
his dad called it, at five in the morning. They were just getting
going, but still. At five and change in the morning, somebody else
had already set up, had ordered, eaten, and now was on at least his
second coffee. That was nothing compared to the bustle of
employees, already abusing the frozen stuff they called food.

An empty, derelict Mac was the spookiest
thing he had ever seen in his life. It was worse than those
apocalypse movies where the whole world's been destroyed. You know,
at least, that everything's broken down or blown up, or both. This
place was fully intact, all lit up, and just as lonely as his
house.

Michael scuttled around through the place
like a crab, sideways, and always checking over his shoulder. He
didn't want to just go behind the counter. It wasn't right. You
couldn't just...

...wait a second. He could just. This wasn't
just any normal situation. This was life or death. If he absolutely
had to make his own Big Mac and fry up his own Mcpotato wedges,
well then that's what he would darned well do. And he could leave
some money on the counter.

He inched his way into alien territory behind
the counter. This place was filled with stuff, rather than the
simple tables-and-chairs setup of the dining area. Every little
space had some kind of compartment for a million different sizes of
bags, straws, a box of ketchup packets and little individual
thingies of salt or pepper. Here there were those ordering
computers, food slider things, packs of happy meal boxes (not put
together yet, still lying flat and stacked up neatly). There were
things he had no words for too, like boxes with hoses coming out,
racks of chemicals, and sets of drawers full of burger making
materials.

“Hold it together Michael,” he murmured to
himself. “It's just the Mac. No reason to get scared of lettuce and
special sauce.”

And most importantly, he was surrounded by
stainless steel boxes. These had to be all the freezers. He opened
one, and saw the Mcpotato wedges in brown paper bags. See, nothing
to it. He went to the large walk-in one and jerked open the shining
metal handle.

And fell back, screaming.

A figure rushed at him, half-frozen, also
screaming and flashing a knife. Michael scrambled away on his butt,
then turned and sprinted out. He didn't look back, but jumped out
of the place, hopped on his bike and raced away.

When he was half a block gone, he turned and
gave the place another look. A minute later, a pack of shuffling
townsfolk walked into the Mac. Soon enough, Michael's attacker was
being hauled out the front doors, kicking and screaming. He kept
saying 'no, no!' over and over again. One of the people was
clutching her bloodied arm. The group stopped, and the woman
started to walk toward the town hospital. Or possibly toward the
DMV, or a little strip mall. But most likely the hospital.

Both of these things should have been
important. Michael knew that. Still, he was too hungry to stop and
try to figure out what was worth knowing there, or how it mattered.
First, home, then food, then figure out next steps.

There was a corner store, where he attacked
the food before he had a chance to check the back rooms. He had a
bag of chips and half a loaf of bread in his stomach before he
realized he was dunking it in hummus. Yuck.

It was still hours before dawn on a cold
winter night, Michael hadn’t actually slept for about twenty-four
hours, and he was terrified to be seen in the streets. He finally
made it home though the backyards of people who’d been stolen out
of their homes and collapsed on his bed. He was asleep before he
closed his eyes.

***

“I didn’t know you had flowery bedsheets,” a
quiet voice said next to him.

Michael couldn’t help it, he screamed like a
girl. In an instant he went from lying on the bed to doing the butt
shuffle until his back was to the wall.

Charlotte just smiled.

“I’ve never been in your room before,” she
said.

“This…” he stammered. “What…I…huh?”

“Sun’s coming up.”

Yes, the sun was coming up. Michael could see
her, a vague outline in the darkness, with her eyes twinkling. They
headed to the kitchen, where she helped herself to some bread with
spinach dip. It reminded him of the hummus dip he’d devoured a few
hours before. There was a great big splotch of black all over the
ceiling, like it had been smooched by a giant smoker, but all the
color was slowly coming into the world.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Surviving,” she said, as if this was nothing
much, really. “I got my mom and the twins in a car and out of town
for a few days. I have no idea where they’re off to, and they’re
not happy that I stayed behind, but there it is. It’s a good job
they did, too.”

She told him about a few other cars that had
tried to get out a bit later, only to be fried to nothing by one of
the zombie Actives. Mr. L had gotten to all the major ways out of
town, and there were enough fliers that he could monitor all the
little ways out of town too. Unless you were going on foot with a
backpack full of camping gear, you weren’t getting out. And since
it was winter, you’d have a rough go of it.

Michael explained how he had tried to get his
mother to listen to him, but she wouldn’t.

“I went straight home,” Charlotte said. “I
had to.”

Michael thought about how he’d sat under
cover and watched the whole town get hypnotized. He could have been
back at home, saving his mother. A blast of regret dropped into his
rumbling stomach. What a jerk he’d been, and how stupid too! If
only he had thought a few minutes, his mother could be safe. Maybe
he could have gotten Grandpa too. He was too busy watching and not
acting.

It was just like with Trent. Instead of doing
something, he’d just stood there like an idiot. It was so hard to
do something when the whole world was spinning out of control. You
didn’t even know really what was happening, much less what to
do.

“I’m sorry about your mom and your
grandfather,” Charlotte said.

“Yeah.”

“Not your fault though,” she told him.

“How you figure that?”

She grinned. “You really think it’s your job
to protect your mom and grandfather? It’s their job to protect you,
silly. You haven’t signed up for the instant adult course. You’re
not even supposed to have a job yet.”

“Well yeah, but I do.”

“That doesn’t make you responsible for saving
peoples’ lives, Michael. I know you took on that girl when she
started pulling apart the school, and you took on Trent, but that
wasn’t your job either time. You were very brave, but it wasn’t
like someone put a sword on your shoulder and said ‘hey bucko,
whenever something goes wrong, you’ve gotta fix it.’”

“If I didn’t, what would’ve happened?” he
asked. “Some other person would get hurt. Maybe killed.”

“Could be, but you don’t know. You put
yourself in that position anyway. So you change the outcome. After
you’re there, the only thing that can happen is
you
get
hurt. Maybe killed.”

He sighed. He just wanted his mother. He
wanted his father, for what good that would do.

“Well,” she said. “Looks like we’re it.”

Yep. Even if they searched the town, and even
if they found other stragglers who were ready to take on Mr. L, it
wouldn’t help. He had so many Actives right now that any sort of
assault would be suicide. You couldn’t attack a force like that.
Look how well all the Actives had done so far.

“We need to find out how heavily they're
fortified in the gym,” he said.

“What makes you think Mr. L's in the
gym?”

“It makes sense,” he said. “If I was an evil
mastermind and I wanted to see everything, that would be the place
I'd pick.”

“Huh,” she said. It wasn't a question.

“What?”

“Well, I did some scouting around, and they
were all going to the high school. You're right, he's set up his
base in the gym.”

“I knew it!” he said. That faint smile was
still drifting over her face. “What else did you find out?”

Mr. L had surrounded himself with a bodyguard
of Actives. Not just the plain old 'I can change radio waves into
light waves' sort of Actives, but the sort who hurled around fire,
who could paralyze you with a touch, or Mr. Springfield. All the
most powerful, dangerous Actives you could find. Which meant that,
not only did he have them controlled telepathically, he also had a
buffet of different abilities to hijack.

“Okay, but they don't want to work for Mr.
L,” Charlotte said, “They're definitely not gnarly dudes
normally.”

“Not gnarly dudes,” he agreed. “But it
doesn't matter. He's messed them up so bad that they'll probably
try to protect him even if we take him out.”

She shuddered.

“I know,” he said. “I don't want to kill
anybody.” He was a thirteen year old boy for pete's sake. He
couldn't just kill somebody. He could hardly even fight a kid who
was two years older than he was.

“If we knock him unconscious, it'll give his
powers back to Terrence,” she said.

“Do you think Mr. Jackson could be that
quick?”

“Well, he doesn't really have to be,” she
told him. “If we cover his eyes, you know, he won't be able to use
his power.”

Which excluded the fact that the zombies
would most likely still be under orders to attack anyone who went
after Mr. L. They would still try to protect him.

“So all we have to do is get through ten
thousand people, into a heavily guarded gym, past the most powerful
people in town, attack a guy who can control anybody's mind, and
then put a blindfold on him while we're being attacked by gravity
girl or fire guy. Then we hope that Mr. Jackson can put everybody
back together again before Mr. L gets the blindfold off.”