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“You’re sure she was OK?”
Colin nodded. “She was. It only took her a few minutes to start blaming Brian for the accident, so that means she was back to normal.”
“Who were the ambulance crew?” his father asked. He was a paramedic, based at the local hospital.
“I didn’t recognise them.” Around a mouthful of mashed potato and peas, he added, “but they checked her over and said she was OK.”
Colin’s mother gave him her famous thin-lipped look, the one that told him she wanted to believe him, but wasn’t so sure. “You promise you’re not making this up?”
“No, it really happened!” Colin waved his cutlery around, demonstrating: “The bus came brrrrrmm around the corner, really fast, and Susie was here, OK? And we were on the corner and all of a sudden Danny was like … zoom! One second he was right next to me and the next he’d scooped Susie up in his arms and was lying on the far side of the road, holding on to her. Then the bus went screeee because the driver hit the brakes, but it was too late because he still hit the bike.”
Colin’s parents looked at each other. His dad said, very quietly, “I see.”
“It’s true,” Colin said. “I swear! You can ask Danny or Brian.”
“That was… very brave of Danny,” his mother said, “and very stupid of Susie to just stop in the middle of the road.”
“Yeah, I know. You should have seen Brian’s face, though. I thought he was going to throw up or faint or something.”
Mr Wagner pushed himself back from the table and got to his feet. “I’d better phone Susie’s parents, see if they need anything. And Danny’s parents too.”
“He’s fine,” Colin said. “There wasn’t a scratch on him.”
“Well, I’ll phone them anyway. Danny might have gone into shock.” He went out into the hall, closing the door behind him.
“So,” Colin’s mother said, “will Danny be coming to the party tomorrow?”
Colin nodded. “Yeah, I think so. And Brian says his parents are going out and they wanted to know if Susie could come too. So I said it was OK. Who else is coming?”
His mother began to list the friends and relatives that had been invited to the party. There were the usual last-minute cancellations and changes and Colin found himself wondering why they couldn’t go to someone else’s.
“And I don’t want you staying up late tonight. We’re going to have a full day tomorrow getting everything ready.”
“But I want to see Max Dalton’s interview!”
“You can tape it and watch it in the morning.”
“You just said that we’re going to have a full day tomorrow!”
“Then you can watch it the day after.”
“Then I’ll be the only one who hasn’t seen it!”
Caroline Wagner sighed. “All right, then. You can stay up for it. Now finish your dinner.”
After dinner, Colin phoned Brian. “So are you coming out tonight?”
“Are you kidding?” Brian said. “My folks went mad about what nearly happened to Susie! They said it was my fault for teasing her. I added up all their punishments and apparently I’m grounded until I’m sixty-one. They’re not even letting me go to your party tomorrow night!”
“You could tell them that you have to come so that you can thank Danny for saving Susie’s life.”
“I already thought of that, but they told me to phone him instead. You know what Susie did? Remember when I had my camera last summer? Well, she took all my photos that Danny was in and she put them up all over her bedroom wall.”
Colin laughed.
“Mad, isn’t it? And you know something else? You know the way we have to write about one of the heroes for homework? Well, Susie’s class has to write an essay called ‘My Hero’, and she’s going to write about Danny.” He let out a long sigh. “God, he’s going to have even more girls after him now! And it’s not as though he’s really a hero. I mean, he just happened to have been looking in the right direction to see the bus. Any one of us could have done it.”
“There was no way he could have seen the bus coming from where we were standing. He must have heard it.” Colin paused. “Though I’ve always had good hearing and I didn’t hear it coming. Did you?”
“No.”
“Then how did he know?”
Brian didn’t have an answer for that one.
“And how did he move so fast?” Colin asked. “I mean, one second he was right next to me, the next he was picking Susie up.”
“I suppose… Col, I wasn’t looking in the right direction. I heard Danny shouting at her, so I turned to look at him. I mean, I was looking right at Susie. I turned to look at Danny when he shouted, but he was gone. And then I looked back and they were on the ground on the other side of the road. I didn’t actually see it happen. Did you?”
“I did,” Colin said. “He was just a blur.”
“But my point is this: he did it in the time it took me to turn my head twice.” They both fell silent again, then, slowly and carefully, Brian said, “Col, that’s not possible. No one can move that fast.”
“Not these days, anyway,” Colin said. “Not since all the superhumans disappeared.”
There was another long pause.
Brian said, “What if…?” He stopped. “Nah, that’s crazy.”
“What?”
“Well, what if Danny is a superhuman?”
Most of the prison was underground. From the air, it looked like a small, isolated farmhouse. Its exact location was known only to a small handful of people. Even the prison doctor didn’t know how to find the place on his own; he was driven to and from the prison in a truck with blacked-out windows.
Warden Mills stood in the doorway, squinting his eyes to shield them from the dust stirred up by the twin rotors of the descending Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Even before the copter touched down, the rear ramp was dropped and fourteen people disembarked. The woman was dressed in a simple black trouser suit with a white blouse and flat shoes, but the thirteen men were wearing crisp army fatigues and all were heavily armed.
“What’s all this?” the warden asked.
“Random inspection,” the woman said.
“But we just had one last month!”
“I think you’ll find that the key word is ‘random’. It wouldn’t be a random inspection if you knew we were coming, would it?”
“Guess not.”
Mills led them along the hall and down into the storm cellar, where a hidden door slid back to reveal the wide stone stairway that led into the prison.
As the men began to unpack their equipment, Mills turned to the woman. “How long will this take?”
“Not long,” she said. “Anything to report?”
“No.” That annoyed the warden a little; they were aware of everything that happened – they even monitored his vital signs – but they still felt they had to ask him stupid questions.
One of the men sat down at the warden’s computer and began tapping away at the keyboard. The other men took out sophisticated scanning devices and started to check the integrity of the doors and walls. Two men made several trips back up to the helicopter, bringing in heavier equipment.
“So,” Mills said to the woman. “How’s life in the outside world? It’s Mystery Day, right?”
“You know I’m not allowed to discuss such things with you.”
“I kind of miss the celebrations.”
The woman didn’t respond to that. Instead, she examined her clipboard. “Now… I’ve been ordered to check on the prisoners.”
Another test, the warden said to himself. “Not possible. No one but me and Doc McLean get to see the prisoners. You know that.”
“We’ll need your access codes to override the locks,” the woman said.
“Yes, you would. If you were getting to see the prisoners. Which you’re not.”
“I’m not asking you, Warden Mills. I’m telling you. Give us the codes.”
“You know I can’t do that without a signed order from Central Command,” Mills said with a smile, to give the impression that he was playing along. Inwardly, he was beginning to get worried. They occasionally sprung surprises on him, but this one felt wrong.
The woman turned to one of the soldiers. “Davison?”
The soldier stepped up to Warden Mills, saluted, and said, “Sir! Direct order from Central Command, Sir! You are to provide us with the override codes necessary for us to access the cells, Sir!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, soldier.”
The warden found himself facing the dangerous end of a gun. He sighed. “Son, put the gun away. You’re embarrassing yourself.” He turned to the woman. “Now, I know that you’ve been ordered to put me to the test, but let’s not, and say we did, OK?”
The soldier fired.
Mills glanced down to see a tranquilliser dart protruding from his chest. He collapsed to the floor.
Davison leaned down and smiled at him. “We know you’ve got a biometric implant that will trigger an alarm if your vital signs fluctuate, Warden Mills. Can’t have that happening.” He reached out and pulled down on the warden’s eyelids, closing them. “Don’t worry, you’re not dying. I’m just closing your eyes to prevent them from drying up. You’ve been dosed with a muscle relaxant. You’ll be paralysed for about seven hours.”
“We have to move fast,” the woman said. “Get those doors open!”
One of the technicians said, “We won’t have time to open them all.”
The woman said, “We don’t need to open them all. Just…” she checked one of the computer screens. “Just Cell 18. The man we’re looking for is called Joseph.”
3 (#ulink_b63d4ca7-b59b-516d-8e80-40b80b1feab9)
LATER, AS HE was attempting to do his homework, Colin couldn’t get the thought out of his mind: Suppose it’s true? Suppose Danny is a superhuman? Maybe he’s been one all along, but kept it secret. Or maybe Danny didn’t even know. This could be the first time he’s ever done anything like that.
If super-powers are inherited, wouldn’t that mean that one of Danny’s parents is a superhuman too?
Colin dismissed this idea almost immediately; Danny’s parents were just too ordinary. Danny’s father was a manager in the local supermarket and his mother was a driving instructor. Danny also had a seven-year-old brother, Niall. If Danny inherited superhuman powers from one of his parents, then that would mean that Niall might also become a superhuman.
Colin forced himself to focus on his homework. A single four-page essay. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, then he would be completely free of homework worry for the rest of the weekend.
He was lying on his bed, on his stomach, with his homework book open on the floor at the foot of the bed. He had half a page done and he wasn’t happy with it. He’d been trying Brian’s idea of writing from the point of view of one of the villains, but it was proving to be tougher than he’d expected.
OK. Concentrate! Suppose I had superhuman powers… Say I could fly. That’d be cool!
While he was day dreaming about joining the school’s athletics team – if he could fly, he’d be a champion long-jumper – a thought came into his mind: I wonder if Danny will be able to fly?
Maybe Danny won’t want his powers and he’ll find a way to give them to me.
Colin sighed and looked down at his homework again.
“I’m not getting anywhere with this,” he muttered to himself. OK. Start over.
He turned to a blank page and began to write: “If I was a superhero, I wouldn’t even tell my best friends because that would put them in danger. I would have to come up with some good excuses for always disappearing to go off and save people.”
Danny’s never done that, so maybe he’s not a superhuman after all. But then, how did he do it? How did he move fast enough to rescue Susie?
Colin looked at the few lines he’d written, put his homework book away and wandered downstairs to the sitting room.
“How’s the essay coming along?” Colin’s Dad asked.
Colin sat down on the floor with his back to the television set. The sound was off and clearly his parents hadn’t been watching it. “Not great. I don’t really know all that much about superhumans. What was it like when they were around? It must have been strange.”
His father said, “I was about your age when the first superhumans began to appear. You know the way they always keep weird stories until the end of the news? Well, that was what it was like, for a while. It was all, ‘And finally, it seems that in New York there’s a new force fighting evil.’ That kind of thing.”
“But weren’t people scared?”
“No, because for a long time most people didn’t really believe it. Not until Paragon went up against Façade.”
“Why? Why was that any different?”
“Because everyone saw it happening live on television. It was in Detroit, one of those charity telethon events, like Comic Relief. They were trying to raise twenty million dollars for… can’t remember what it was now.”
“Education,” Colin’s mother said.
“Right, education. Anyway, it’s all just about over, and they’re going on about how much money they’ve raised, then all of a sudden one of the guest musicians comes out and he just transforms himself into Façade. He’s got a whole bunch of thugs with him and Façade demands fifty million dollars or the studio audience and all these celebrities will be killed. Façade is strutting about, showing off his powers by shape-shifting into different people, when Paragon just drops out of the ceiling and lands on top of him. Bam! One punch to the head and Façade is out cold! A couple of his henchmen turn their guns on Paragon, but he just flies right into them, knocking them over. Then he launched a dozen gas grenades. The gas instantly sent everyone in the studio – even the hostages – to sleep. The cameras were still running, though, so we could watch him tying up Façade and his men.”
“It would have been a great court case, too,” Caroline said, “if Façade hadn’t escaped from custody on the way to the trial.”
“What about Paragon, though? If he arrived so quickly, doesn’t that suggest that he lived nearby? I mean, from what I’ve read about him he wasn’t able to fly very fast.”
“Maybe he just happened to be close by for some other reason,” Caroline said.
“Yeah, but… I suppose the police had the TV studio surrounded, right? That means that Paragon would have had to get past them in order to get into the studio. So you know what I’m thinking?”
