Super Human (2 page)

Half-whimpering, Imkhamun asked, “You . . . you would take us to Assyria?”

“No. We will march on Memphis. Your king will be put to the sword, your vaults plundered.” Krodin leaned closer. “And you will burn your crops, salt the land so that nothing will ever grow again. Before the week is out, Egypt’s lush fields will be a desert. Your kingdom will fall. This is the price you pay for attacking Assyria.”

Slowly, awkwardly, Imkhamun climbed to his feet. “This will not happen.”

Krodin grinned. “Earlier I thought you a coward, for only a coward attacks without reason or warning. But . . . you are not a coward, Egyptian. You stand up to me even though you have seen me devastate your army. There are many humans I would call brave, but surely you are among the bravest.” He raised his left sword, pressed its point against Imkhamun’s throat. “Or the most stupid.”

“Then strike me down, Assyrian. I have lived well and served King Sahure with unwavering loyalty, and I am ready to walk the fields of Aaru. But before you extinguish my light, tell me your name that I might warn Osiris and Ammit of your eventual coming.”

“Oh, I have had many names, Egyptian. I have called myself Krodin these past two centuries.”

Despite his fear, despite the sword at his throat, Imkhamun frowned. “Two centuries? Impossible. No man can live so long.”

“I have lived that, and longer. And I will live longer still. The gods of your afterlife have no need to fear me, Egyptian, for I cannot die. I am immortal, ageless, indestructible. Already I have walked this Earth for more than five hundred years. I have seen many empires rise and fall, and I have no doubt that I will see many more. I ally myself with Assyria simply because it suits me to do so. But make no mistake: I am not Assyrian.”

“You . . . you are a god?”

“No. I am not a god. Nor am I human.”

It should have been a good day. It was late spring, a warm, sunny Thursday, and school was out because almost half of the teachers had called in sick. Even better, the kids knew that there weren’t many teachers who’d take a sick day on Thursday and then come back to school on Friday. That almost certainly meant a four-day weekend.

For most of the kids of Fairview, South Dakota, it
was
a good day. But not for Lance McKendrick. The day had started out well, but it had turned sour pretty quickly.

Lance was on the run again. His sneakers pounded across the huge mall’s polished floor tiles as he darted left and right around the late-afternoon shoppers.

Behind him three of the mall’s security guards were shouting for everyone to clear the way. He couldn’t understand how this time they were so close to catching him. Usually he was able to give them the slip in a matter of seconds.

And then he glanced back and spotted his marked playing cards spilling out of his pocket, leaving a handy trail for the guards to follow.

Lance threw the rest of the cards into a trash can, vaulted over a wooden bench, ducked under the outstretched arms of the clown selling overpriced helium balloons, skidded around Uncle Harry’s ice-cream stand, and raced up the down escalator.

Panicked parents dragged their children aside as Lance apologized his way up the moving stairs. “Sorry, sorry, comin’ through...”

He emerged into the sprawling food court and couldn’t resist a smile. He’d been worried that the recent flu epidemic might keep people away from the mall, but it was quite the opposite: The place was packed. He was going to get away.

He pulled his distinctive Red Sox cap from his head. He knew how the security guards’ minds worked: They were chasing a teenager in a red cap. They wouldn’t remember anything else about his appearance.

Behind him, the guards were bellowing orders into their walkie-talkies. That was a good thing, Lance knew: It made everyone stop and stare at them.

He spotted a large crowd of kids his own age and zipped past them, then doubled back and stood among them as they watched the panting rent-a-cops charge past.

Idiots,
Lance said to himself.

The last of the security guards—a large, potbellied man whose wheezing and coughing suggested that he really should have taken a sick day—lumbered past and Lance sidled away from the other teens.

He opened his backpack and was about to stuff the cap into it when he changed his mind. If the security guards decided to search bags on the way out he’d be caught. He dropped the cap onto a table close to the Golden Path Eatery and kept moving.

Lance didn’t consider himself to be one of the bad guys. Most of his scams were pretty basic and technically not illegal, like buying a dozen cans of cola from the Supersaver Drugstore for twenty-eight cents each, sticking out-of-order signs on the vending machines in the mall, then waiting around for unsuspecting thirsty people to become frustrated that they couldn’t get their caffeine fix. Lance would kindly offer to sell them one of his cans for a dollar.

He’d never stolen anything. Not really. Occasionally he might take something that didn’t belong to him, but in his mind that wasn’t the same as stealing. Or he might sneak into a warehouse while the loading dock was open and no one was watching and look for things that probably wouldn’t be missed. Big companies always allow for a certain amount of lost or damaged goods, so Lance told himself that wasn’t really stealing either.

Lance was fourteen, attended Martin Van Buren High School with his older brother, and by his own choice had no close friends. He never volunteered for anything in class, made sure his grades were exactly average, never joined in with any of the social activities or did anything that would make people notice him. His goal was to make it all the way through high school—and later college—and have no one really remember much about him.

He was of average height and build for his age. He had ordinary brown hair, blue eyes, a straight nose, and mostly even teeth. He was aware that he wasn’t particularly good-looking, but he was fairly sure that he wasn’t ugly either.

His brother Cody was two years older. He had jet-black hair—always perfectly groomed—and deeply tanned skin, and was considered to be quite a catch. Cody played on the school baseball team, where he was something of a minor celebrity as a good all-rounder. He was involved in a dozen different social groups, excelled in most of his classes, and could play the guitar well enough that he was constantly turning down offers from his many friends to form a band.

Everyone liked Cody, even the ultra-cynical kids who dressed only in black, hated everything, and thought that happy people were losers.

And Lance liked his brother well enough too. The only thing that bothered him about Cody was his popularity. Lance didn’t want to be known as “Cody McKendrick’s little brother.” It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be compared to Cody—he didn’t want anyone to notice him at all.

Lance’s philosophy was simple: If he ran a scam on someone and they remembered him, he’d failed. Even if he somehow still got away with it, it was a failure. The only true success was when he deprived someone of the burden of their money and they walked away without realizing what had really happened.

He wanted to be like the superhuman who called himself Façade, except that Façade was a villain. Lance knew that if he could change his appearance at will then he’d be practically unstoppable.

He didn’t see
himself
as a villain. He never took money from anyone who couldn’t afford it. Even when he was running a three-card monte con, he made a point of not taking
all
of the mark’s money. He knew that if the mark still had enough money to get home, then he’d be less likely to think he’d been ripped off. And there’d be a greater chance that he’d try again next time, in the hope that he might win his money back. Sometimes, if the mark insisted on risking the last of his money, Lance would give a few dollars back to him after he lost. That way the mark would think that Lance was an OK guy—and then he’d definitely come back again.

Anyway, if they were dumb enough to believe that it was possible to win at three-card monte, they
deserved
to lose their money.

Lance believed that there was nothing wrong with persuading people they could beat a game with impossibly high odds. The government did it all the time with the state lotteries. The chance of winning the Powerball jackpot was less than one in a hundred million. Statistically it was much, much harder to win than it would be to open the phone book at random in the dark, stick a pin in a page, do it forty times in a row, and hit the same number every time.

He made his way back through the food court, down the escalator, and toward the west entrance.

There was a large crowd clustered around the doorway.
Perfect,
Lance thought.
Easy enough to get away if everyone is looking at something else.

It was only as he was squeezing through the crowd that he began to wonder just what it was that had drawn hundreds of people to the entrance.

He stretched up onto his toes to peer over the sea of heads, and spotted something shiny and silver. For a second he thought it was a guy in a motorbike helmet, but then the man turned his head, scanning the crowd.

Lance ducked down again, sidestepped past a woman holding up her toddler, and did his best to look completely innocent as he passed through the doors and began to amble away.

He’d taken less than a dozen steps when he realized his mistake: When a big-time superhero makes an appearance at the local mall, only the guilty would leave the scene.

It was too late.

A heavy hand landed on Lance’s shoulder, and a deep, almost mechanical, voice said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

Lance dry-swallowed. The hand on his shoulder was encased in metal. It was holding him firmly. Not tight enough to hurt—though it certainly looked as though it could do that—but tight enough that he couldn’t easily duck out of the grip and make a run for it.

“Well?”

“Just, y’know, uh . . . home?”

He turned around slowly and looked at his distorted reflection in the polished, opaque visor of the armored man.

The crowd had formed a circle around them. Lance knew now that he was not going to get away.

Paragon was a head taller than Lance and covered head to toe in polished metal armor that seemed to be bristling with weapons and pieces of equipment. Fixed to a socket on his left hip was what looked like an oversize handgun; a three-pronged hook protruded from its barrel. His famous jetpack was strapped to his back, and three pairs of handcuffs were clipped to his belt, along with half a dozen stuffed pouches. Even his steel-covered gloves had small storage areas around the cuffs.

Lance couldn’t help but notice a close grouping of dents and scratches in the silver chest-plate, and was glad that he wasn’t the guy who had shot at Paragon only to discover that the armor was bulletproof.

“Your heartbeat and perspiration are way up. You’re the one the security guards were chasing. The junior cardsharp.” It wasn’t even a question. The armored man’s head swiveled smoothly from side to side. “Interesting situation we have here, kid. . . . You’re hardly worth the trouble of arresting. So what should I do? What would
you
do, if you were me?”

Lance tried to shrug himself out of his jacket. “Um . . . give me a stern warning and let me go?”

“And the money you’ve taken? How much?”

“Ten bucks.”

Paragon leaned closer, his helmet almost pressing against Lance’s forehead. “
How
much?”

Lance swallowed again.
Man, I am so busted. . . .
“Hundred and forty-five.”

“One hundred and forty-five dollars.” Without turning away from Lance, Paragon pointed through the onlookers toward a girl standing by the mall’s entrance with a collection tin. “Which you are kindly going to donate to charity, right?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Lance said, nodding. “That was the plan all along.”

“Perhaps you’d be even kinder and round it up to, say, two hundred?”

“I don’t have that much on me,” Lance stammered.

“Just give as much as you can. That’s what good citizens do. Name?”

“Jason Myers.” Lance was comfortable with that. It was the name he always used when doing business. He’d used it so often that when anyone called out the name Jason he automatically turned to look.

“ID?”

Lance reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew the fake student ID card, held it up for Paragon to see.

After a moment, the armored hero nodded. “All right.” He plucked the card out of Lance’s hand. “You won’t mind if I keep this, will you? I’m going to add it to my collection. . . . Gotta tell you, though, this is one of the best I’ve seen. It’s almost perfect.”

Lance sighed. “OK. You caught me. But you can’t do anything. I’m fourteen. You can’t arrest me. You’re not a cop.”