The Doomsday Device (Teen Superheroes Book 2) (5 page)

My eyes shifted to the digital clock next to my bed.

3.14am

Great. I lay in the bed and listened to the silence. I knew the sounds of the desert. The wind sweeping over the hills. A piece of metal that rattled on the porch. Tonight there seemed to be none of that.

Still, I could hear something. A crackling sound.

Climbing out of bed, I threw some clothes on and wandered down the passageway. A light was on in Brodie’s room down the hall. Her door was open. Brodie appeared in the doorway.

“Do you hear that?” she asked quietly.

“What is it?”

“Sounds like a fire.”

“Out here?”

Another light snapped on down the hall. Chad blearily appeared with his hair askew. He never looked his best first thing in the morning. He looked even worse now.

“Whassgoingon?” he asked. “Whassthenoise?”

“We’re not sure,” Brodie said. “Sounds like a fire.”

Chad mumbled something and disappeared back into his room. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so we continued onto the porch. The night was dark, but the glow of Las Vegas still illuminated the night sky. Other nearby towns also bleached their glow into the sky.

“What’s that over there?” Brodie asked.

Another glow lay between nearby hills. I had never seen it before. We started across the desert. After a few moments, Brodie grabbed my arm.

“Wouldn’t it be faster if we flew?” she asked.

“I’m not sure if I trust -.”

“Let’s worry about that later. Someone might be in trouble.”

I formed an invisible force field. We climbed aboard and zoomed across the desert. Brodie was right. By the time we flew over the crest of the hill we could see what had caused the fire. A car lay overturned by the side of the road.

“Hell,” I said.

“Bring us in close.”

We came in to land directly next to the vehicle. Cars rarely came this way. It was one of those roads that literally led nowhere. Brodie and I had followed it one day. It simply trailed off after a couple of miles into the desert. I’m not sure it even had a name.

The car was alight and had been in flames for some time. Maybe this was what had awoken us; the sound of the car flipping on the road. There was no-one in the vehicle. Maybe they had been thrown free.

We started searching all around the area looking for the driver. We should have brought torches. At that moment the sound of footsteps crunching across the dry earth caught our attention.

“Thanks for waiting!” Chad yelled. He had brought two torches with him so we started to systematically search the area by dividing it into a grid pattern. The minutes passed slowly. The car continued to burn. We extended the search area and searched that too.

This made no sense.

“Where is the driver?” Brodie asked.

“Maybe he was able to walk away and he’s walking back to Vegas,” Chad said. “Sometimes people walk away from some pretty bad accidents.”

“Maybe.” I was still unconvinced. We went back to the car and searched for footprints around the wreck. If they existed it was too dark to see them. The driver’s side door had broken off in the crash. I turned it over in the darkness.

“Bring the torch over here,” I asked Chad.

He shone it on the door. All three of us peered at a mark in the centre of the door. There was no denying what it looked like, but that was impossible.

“It looks like a footprint,” Brodie said.

“So the driver crashed his car,” Chad said. “And then kicked the door off its hinges.”

“That would take superhuman strength,” I said. “How is that possible?”

“Something else makes no sense either,” Chad said. “What’s this car doing out here? No-one comes out here in the middle of the day let alone at night.”

“Maybe someone wanted to draw us out here,” Brodie suggested.

A chill ran up and down my spine. “Not to draw us here.”

“What -.” Chad started.

I looked back towards the house. “To draw us away.”

Chapter Nine

Ebony had awoken in the darkness with no idea as to what roused her from her sleep. At first she thought it was someone using the bathroom, but there was no sound of the toilet flushing. All the lights were out. The entire house lay in silence. She glanced at the clock.

3:30am

What the hell?

This was
way
too early to be awake. Lying on her side, she closed her eyes again. Time to go back to sleep.

Except a noise was coming from the door.

She always slept with her door open. She liked air to circulate through her room at night. She kept her window open too, but it was permanently locked so that only two or three inches were open at the bottom.

The sound coming from her door sounded like scratching. Could it be a rat? There were various types of small animals that lived in the desert. Maybe something had come in from outside. Tilting her head ever so slightly, she peered over towards the door and saw only blackness.

Something hit the side of her dressing table.

What the -?

Moving her line of sight away from the doorway, she tried to see her dressing table, but found it impossible without moving her head. Now the sound seemed to find purchase on the wall. It slowly ascended until there was a slight bump as it reached the ceiling. She dared not move a muscle. She had no idea what it was, but it was large. She knew that by the way it collided with the ceiling.

Could it be a bird? But no bird could be so large. What the hell was it?

Only now did she allow herself to move her head slightly in the darkness. She did so with infinitesimal movement. One tiny fraction of an inch at a time. Whatever it was in the room could not possibly detect the slow movement.

Could it?

Her eyes moved to the ceiling above her dressing table. All she saw was darkness. One large patch of darkness. The longer she stared at the darkness, the more she thought it odd.

Why was that one patch so dark? It seemed to be blacker than -.

Something moved past her door.

It took every bit of control for Ebony to bite back a scream. Whoever – or whatever – it was that had moved by had done so in complete silence. It had done so without even making the sound of a foot tread on the timber floors. Like a ghost.

How was such a thing possible?

Now Ebony returned her gaze to the space above her dressing table and she felt a growing horror that chilled her to the soul.

The patch above the dressing table was no longer in darkness. If anything, the ceiling looked uniformly dark. She shifted her eyes again to the dressing table next to her bed. Her bedside lamp was within reach. Within her bedside drawer lay a gun. Dan had been able to procure it for her from a gun dealer in town. The poor man had thought he was selling it to a husband and wife from Tallahassee instead of a pair of teenagers with no identification.

Another sound came from the ceiling.

Directly above her.

Ebony had never felt such terror in her life.

The dark shape that had hovered over her dressing table now hovered directly over her bed. It clung to the ceiling directly over her. To make matters worse she thought she could make out some detail. In its own strange way it looked like a spider.

An enormous spider.

She felt sick.

I have super powers
, Ebony reminded herself.
I can transmute a substance into anything of my choosing. I can turn a human being into salt if necessary. I can turn lead into gold.

She had even spoken to Chad about how she could use non lethal force against people if necessary. A person would be rendered immobile if she grabbed their clothing – their shirt, for instance – and transformed it into steel. They would be stuck in position, unable to make a move.

Think steel
, she told herself.
Think steel.

Just as she decided to reach across and turn her lamp on, the shape on the ceiling shifted position slightly. Two tiny red balls of light came to life directly above her. Ebony felt her heart chugging like a steam engine. Her whole body grew rigid as if she were slowly turning to ice.

Eyes.

A pair of glowing red eyes peered down from the ceiling at her.

Her left arm shot out and grabbed the light switch for the lamp. She snapped it on. At the same time she reached up with her hand.

“Steel!” she snapped. “St-.”

She got no further. A man lay back comfortably on the ceiling staring down at her. He was naked except for a pair of leather briefs. He appeared to be about twenty-five years of age, clean shaven, muscular and very pale. In the darkness his eyes had burned bright red, but now the light was on they were black. Even the normally white pupils were black. It was like looking at someone who had two perfectly black balls in their eye sockets instead of their eyes.

He smiled.

There was nothing nice about that smile.

Ebony decided to scream. She was good at screaming. The sound would wake the entire household. She got as far as drawing back her breath. Then she looked into the man’s eyes and saw he loved her.

He really,
really
loved her. It was a timeless love. An eternal love. For as long as she lived she would never find a love like this. Their love would exist from now till all life faded on Earth. Even now time seemed to fall away. The man leapt down from the ceiling and landed nimbly on his feet next to her bed. His eyes remained on her the whole time.

“My name is Anthony,” he said. “And you are?”

“Ebony.”

“Ebony. Such a beautiful name.” He held out his hand. “Arise.”

Ebony pushed back her sheet, placed her feet on the floor and stood before him.

“Do you know how long I searched for you?” he asked.

“Forever,” Ebony said. She knew that. Anthony had searched far and wide for his one true love and now he had found her and she had found him and they would be joined for all time. It was a love that no man could tear asunder. It had been said that love was a drug. If it was, she was an addict.

His eyes continued to bore into her and now she knew she had to offer herself to him completely. She had to be
owned
by him for their love to be consummated and there was only one way for that to happen.

She tilted her head, offering her neck to him. Anthony smiled and she smelt his breath. One part of her mind told her his breath was rotten. Fetid. Like road kill on the side of a busy highway in the middle of summer.

She didn’t care.

Love was like that.

“Time to -.”

Before Anthony had a chance to complete the sentence, a fist appeared from nowhere and collided with the side of his head. The impact was so massive his entire body slammed into her bedside table and continued into the wall until he was jammed into the gap. He let out a shriek of rage as he struggled to escape the wall.

Ferdy pulled him out of the gap and with no effort at all, threw him through the window. He fell into the night beyond.

Ebony regained her senses just in time to understand Ferdy’s words.

“Vampires,” he said. “Originating from the early Serbian word
vampir
meaning a dead creature known to drink blood.”

Chapter Ten

By the time we reached the house we were just in time to see a figure being thrown through the window. A man. He rolled twice leapt to his feet and yelled in a foreign language. He leapt up from the ground and jumped.

Straight up onto the roof.

“What the hell -.” I started.

“He yelled something in German,” Chad said. “Something about us returning. There must be others in the house.”

The man raced along the top of the roof as nimbly as a cat. I started after him, landing a few feet behind him. He turned around and aimed a fist at my head.

Smack!

I didn’t even see it coming. One second I was reaching for him. The next the blow almost took off the top of my head. I hit the roof, rolled off and only just threw up a shield in time to stop myself from slamming into the ground. As soon as I righted myself I felt the impact of something landing on my back. An arm encircled my neck.

The man was trying to bite me!

I focused on creating a blast of air and hit him firmly in the face with it. He flew backwards into the darkness.

By now lights were coming on all over the house. I saw Ebony through her window struggling with another of the figures. It was a girl clad in a leather bra and shorts. Ferdy was holding another of the creatures around the neck.

The man came racing towards me from the darkness. He had his mouth open. I could see large incisors -.

Fire leapt out of the darkness and engulfed him.

He shrieked in agony and I felt someone pushing me down.

“They’re vampires,” Chad said.

“How do you know?” I asked, watching the figure rolling around on the ground.

“What else would they be?”

I remembered the teeth.

Okay. They were vampires.

He gave the burning vampire another blast and then turned to climb through Ebony’s window. I followed him. Ebony was trying unsuccessfully to turn her vampire to salt. Where her hands touched the creature, I could see large patches of salt, but the substance was not spreading to the rest of the creature.

The vampire turned its head and I saw her eyes.

I suddenly wondered why we were fighting them. Especially this girl. I felt I had been searching for her my entire life and now -.

Chad engulfed her head in a block of ice.

The spell faded.

“They’re vampires,” Ebony shouted, breaking me free of the creature. “They can mesmerize you!”

They can mesmerize you.

I remembered the ancient legends. Which meant they could brainwash you in a fashion similar to Dan. That was one of their legendary powers. And supposedly they had the strength of ten men. And they could turn into bats.

But how much of it was legend and how much was true? The vampire in Ferdy’s grasp seemed helpless. Whatever autism Ferdy suffered from made him invincible to their mesmerizing powers.  Ferdy had his hand firmly around the creature’s neck.