Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (30 page)

“Or we tie up his hands,” Charlotte said.

“This is impossible,” he said.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “If only you were really
psychic like Mr. L thinks you are. Then everybody would listen to
you. You could, you know, break down their funky mind control
issues.”

“If wishes were fishes...” he mumbled.

An idea was slowly pushing out of the dense
soil of his stupid brain, and slowly spreading out its leaves. It
needed more sun.

“Wait a second,” he said.

“You've got something.”

“Yeah, wait...I saw something. My grandfather
was holding out against Mr. L for a long time. I mean, he still got
him in the end, but the younger people just snapped, like,
instantly. And then, wait, and then, one of them got hurt at
McDonald's, and she started walking to the hospital.”

He started to explain, slowly at first. Then,
as the sunlight reached his idea, Charlotte started adding water.
The idea sprouted lightning fast, and before long had blossomed
into a flower. An ugly, dangerous flower sure, but a flower
nonetheless.

“You think it'll work?” he asked her.

She smiled. “Well let's see...your
grandfather and the town forefathers are in some nasty juju, and
all the Actives in town too. Probably the keepers of the Keys are
down there in the basement of the library turning all of their
little sticks from green to red. So I'd say our plan's got a better
chance than anything else.”

“That's just because there is nothing else,”
he said.

“Well yeah,” she grinned.

But, since Charlotte was a positive force of
nature, and because there really wasn't any other plan in town,
they were going to go ahead anyway. At this point, dying wasn't the
worst thing that could happen to them.

It was fully light by the time they pedaled
all the way to the hospital. Charlotte didn't have a bike of her
own, so she borrowed Michael's, and he used his dad's. It was an
uncomfortable ride, and not because of the cold or the terror of
being found and abducted by Mr. L's force of evil. Mostly it was
that he couldn't get his butt up on the seat, and he couldn't
settle the cross bar on his crotch without severe pain. He had to
remind himself over the several mile journey, that Charlotte was
more comfortable on his bike, and she was the linchpin to the whole
plan. Eventually they stopped as BH Obama Hospital appeared in the
distance.

“Alright,” he said. They pulled over the
bikes and stashed them in someone's backyard. Michael made a mental
note in case of sudden escape: maroon house.

“Okay. So far so good. Now we just find an
opening in the fence, sneak over this completely open ground for
like half a mile, over the enormous parking lot, and into the
emergency room.”

“Where there are most likely going to be
armed security guards.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Easy as pie,” she grinned.

“You need to stop being relentlessly
cheerful. The glare is blinding me.”

Her dial-a-smile went up another few notches.
Michael told himself that, after this was all over he was going to
ask her out, like on a date. If he saved his mom's life, she would
definitely probably take he and Charlotte to the movies. Then he
shook his head and got all that soppy stuff out. If this went the
way he thought it would, he would probably be burnt to a crisp, cut
into a thousand pieces, shot, stabbed, stung with poison barbs, and
maybe even eaten. There were a couple of Actives who turned pretty
beastly when they put their abilities on. He’d seen it on the
Discovery Channel once upon a time.

But the sneak over to the hospital proved
uneventful. They approached the emergency room without any trouble,
waited for the sliding door, and went inside.

“You're sure you can do this?” Michael asked
her.

She grabbed his hand and squeezed. It did not
help his distracting date fantasy at all.

“All right then. If this doesn't work...”

“It's going to work.”

“But if it doesn't, because any number of
things could go wrong and we could be dead in a few minutes.”

“Always the optimist,” she chuckled.

“Anyway if it doesn't work, it was, I mean,
you...I like you.” A fluttery burning sensation went up his chest.
It was always something that had been there, whenever she was
around. Only now it was a lot more…distracting.

“I like you too,” she said.

“Like a lot!” he blurted out. He continued to
burn, and he realized his ears and cheeks were probably cherry
red.

She winked at him. “You're a sweetheart
Michael.” Then she faced forward, and Charlotte was gone. In her
place stood Archibald Lansing, town terror, in all his five feet
eight of bald, bespectacled, smirking glory. Complete with beer
gut.

“Well if it isn’t the infamous Michael
Washington,” Mr. L said, and smiled his lopsided smile.

“You do that way too well,” Michael
muttered.

“Now get in there so my minions can tear you
limb from limb.”

“Very funny.”

But a dozen people had spotted them by now,
and were all making their way out. Every single one of them had
that slightly dazed, how-did-I-get-here look about them, like
they’d just woken up from a particularly bad dream and couldn’t
figure out how they weren’t in their beds.

As one, they moaned. Michael was sorely
tempted to do the same. Their moans were all one, all at the same
time, and all very zombie. Michael’s was pure horror.

The emergency room looked untouched, for the
most part. If it was a real zombie movie, this place would be full
of blood and screaming. This hospital was sterile, smelling sharply
of antiseptic. None of the soft, welcoming colors were coated in
blood. It was just another peaceful day in Mr. L-town. In the
middle of the emergency room reception area were a group of five
doctors, all staring around at the others just like Michael was.
Michael figured Mr. L couldn’t mess with their minds in case of an
emergency.

“It’s him,” twenty people said all at once.
“The Michael.”

“Oh that is creepy. Creepy creepy,” he
muttered.

“I have him,” Charlotte said from his side,
only it was Mr. L’s voice speaking the words.

“The Michael must die,” they said. As one,
they began to shuffle forward. Some of the older zombies weren’t
quick about it. In fact, they weren’t quick about anything. The
younger people darted from their positions, people his mom’s age
jerked forward, and the older people practically dragged their
bodies toward him. They seemed more like zombies every second, and
here was Michael just calmly standing in front of them.

“Not just yet,” Mr. L replied.

Several of them paused and cocked their
heads.

“The Michael must die,” they repeated.

“You listen to me, isn’t that right?” Mr. L
said, sneering. “That’s your job, so listen to me now. The Michael
isn’t ready to die yet.”

Several people jerked their heads to the
side, like they were trying to shake loose some of their orders.
Some of the younger people, high schoolers and anyone under maybe
twenty five, started pulling their hair. Michael saw blood starting
to flow from noses. Whatever Mr. L had done to them, it had been
quick and dirty. Their minds were really starting to lose it in the
face of these strange orders.

“We can kill him later, all right?” Mr. L
shouted. “No problem killing him, just not right now.”

That seemed to settle them down. Michael
shuddered, and not with the cold.

“First we have a problem,” Mr. L told them.
“Listen carefully.”

It was an hour’s march with all these people.
Michael had only been to the high school a few times in his life.
One of those was when his father took him to a state championship
basketball game, and he’d been five. The gym, like everything else
at the time, had been completely titanic. He had trouble
understanding how they could make walls or a ceiling that
encapsulated the entire universe. The players on the court had
seemed like giants. Even the basketball was enormous.

It had shrunk in the last eight years, but
not much. The high school was still at least twice as big as
LADCEMS, and maybe bigger. He couldn’t see all of it. What he could
see was the gymnasium and pool, both huge brick structures reaching
toward the sky, both with huge ‘Fighting Eagles!’ banners. Not far
off was the Olympic-sized running track with dual sets of
bleachers.

“Remember!” Mr. L shouted from beside
Michael, “Your lives are at stake here. The imposter wants to
destroy all of you, he wants to kill you and take your children and
grandchildren. He wants to break down every home, every business in
your town. He is a nasty liar, and he has no taste in music.”

Something in Charlotte’s words seemed to ring
with the assembled wounded, and most especially the elders. Before,
they’d fallen behind, they’d walked stiffly and jerkily. Now they
seemed to wake up. It was the first time Michael saw something like
life in their eyes, and he understood something: Mr. L hadn’t just
chosen the high school for the size, for the ability to see
everyone under his command easily.

He’d also come for the new Actives, the young
ones who were easiest to control.

“Are you ready for this?” Charlotte’s voice
whispered.

“Not really,” he said. He shifted the
backpack in his hands, and tried not to think about what was
inside. Clouds had started their lumbering move in while he and
Charlotte were in the hospital, and now the first thick flakes
drifted down.

“It’s already snowing outside.”

“Time to make it snow inside,” he said.

“Alright, let’s do it,” she said.

The gym had several entrances, one of which
came in from the locker room and another two from hallways. The
locker room was probably the sneakiest way in, but he had no idea
how to get there. He went the long way around the pool, slipped a
mask out of his backpack, and put it on. Then he went into the
school. Far off already, he heard Charlotte’s Mr. L battle cry.

There was a patrol just coming out of the
entrance, but they ignored Michael. He forced himself to calmly
walk into the school, and observed the comings and goings of the
zombies through the hall. There weren’t many. He wanted to linger.
Every bit of his body and mind screamed at him to stop, not to go
through with this. But Charlotte…

Another part of him calmly replied that
Charlotte, while wonderful, was completely nuts. She believed that
their little group from the hospital was going to last against Mr.
L’s thousand or two thousand or whatever, and give him the time he
needed.

The original part of Michael, the terrified
and wide-eyed part argued that Charlotte was wonderful, and she was
sticking her neck out for him. His mother was in this gym, and
Grandpa too. As soon as his dad got home from wherever in the world
he was, he’d be in the gym too.

He opened the door, slipped inside, and
immediately wished he hadn’t.

The gym wasn’t just as big as it had been
before, it was bigger. He’d never been down on the floor with a few
hundred pairs of eyes on him. He swallowed.

All the bleachers were pulled out, and every
single seat was full. The floor was similarly full. Down there, two
Mr. L’s were shouting at one another, pointing. People were staring
at them, unsure of what to do.

“That man is clearly an imposter!” they both
screamed at the same time.

Michael looked up, far above him. There was a
sort of balcony, a smaller court with netting, where more bleachers
were pulled out, and above that, gleaming metal nozzles stared down
over everybody, like silent snakes just waiting to uncoil from the
pipelines overhead and snap up everybody watching the spectacle
below.

But the bleachers were completely full. There
was no way he could get up there, unless…

“Kill that imposter, right now!” Mr. L
shouted. Michael’s stomach dropped into his pants, and he started
up the stairs to the upper level. When he got there, he flattened
himself to the wall and made his way under the bleachers. Now he
was confronted by a jungle of black metal struts reaching up
fifteen, twenty feet in the air. He began climbing.

He shut his ears to whatever was happening
below, and kept repeating to himself. It was an awkward climb.
These metal bars were flat, not sharp, but still not made for
climbing. He slipped several times and banged his arms against
them, but bit his tongue against crying out. Zombies did not cry
out.

“They don’t recognize me,” he whispered.
“They don’t recognize me. They don’t…and I’m definitely not looking
down.”

He reached the top and started the delicate
process of worming his way back above the bleachers. If he thought
the climb had been hard, he was wrong. Banging his body parts was a
leisurely stroll through the neighborhood compared with hanging
twenty feet in the air, trying to loop his leg over something all
the while avoiding kicking zombie watchers in the stands.

By the time he pulled himself up, the
shouting match was over. He risked a look down, and found Actives
moving through the crowd, some huge, some glowing, some hissing,
but all creating instant pathways.

They were looking for him.

He checked above his head. He could reach the
stupid nozzles, but it would mean exposing his position. Oh well.
Even a super fast Active couldn’t get up here instantly, they’d
have to push a couple hundred people out of the way.

But no reason to do it just yet. He snapped
the trigger on the camping lighter and adjusted the flame to its
highest. He didn’t know the foot high flame trick that smokers did
with their lighters, this two incher would have to do. Then he
bound the whole thing in wire, so he had perma-fire.

Then he stood up.