I can't see my face, but I grab for the salami and it's there. Still in the dark, I carefully exit the bed, realizing now that my longer legs will take getting used to. I put on the outfit and grab my room key. I am tempted to just leave, but I decide it's better to check and make sure that I look human before I go, after all, I did not buy underwear so I am going commando. The same new face stares back at me, shakes it's head, and barefoot, exits the room.
Without any doubt, I could get to the ground floor by going through the concrete to get there, all I'd have to do is step harder. I would describe the feeling better, but no human being has the words for it. I've never moved so fast. I head down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and I am able to travel from landing to landing in great leaps (single bounds?). I break the lock on the door to the street I'm in such a hurry to get it open, forgetting that it's after 10.
There's no real beach in Kona, so I jog up the road toward Kahalu`u Bay. I get there after it's technically closed, except that a couple homeless people are always hanging around. I don't know what to do with myself, how do you learn to be Superman? I decide to see how high I can jump. My normal hops are about 18 inches, so in my mind I think 150 feet? Then I think about coming down from that height. I turn toward the ocean so whatever happens I'll end up in the water. The light can barely contain itself laughing.
I bend my legs, take a deep breath, hold it, close my eyes, grimace slightly, and jump as hard as I can. Don't know how high I got, but when I open my eyes, I'm well above the Outrigger hotel just next to the bay, and it's 12 stories. I am also well out over the ocean, the wind in my face, dropping toward the dark surface below. I am scared shitless and screaming like a little girl. I hit the water hard, slide quickly 20 feet or so below sea level, and then bob to the surface, my swim trunks and nose full of water and slimy something. It didn't hurt, except that I have no manliness remaining, and I have to spend a couple minutes treading water, cleaning out my pants, portals, and pride.
I swim to shore with a couple strokes and a few kicks. I look back and have literally left a wake behind me. I turn to the ocean and do it all over again without the screaming. Then a third time and a fourth. The last time I end up a long way off shore, my brain thinks at least a mile, which makes me sure I have this part down, and I'm enjoying it. Actually, I don't know what jumping into the ocean has to do with saving the world anyway.
There's a car, an old school Civic, parked on the side of the road. I get a crazy idea. Walking over, I stand in front of it, reach down with my right hand, and lift. I get the front end a couple feet up before I realize there is no way to get under it without damaging it. I put it back down, walk over to the passenger side, reach back down, tilt it up and then put my left hand on the underside. Ten seconds later I am walking down Ali'i Drive carrying a vintage automobile. I go 100 feet, put it down, and discover I've bent the side panel in. I decide to leave the car where it is.
Ok, so not really sure what I'm doing. Running, it occurs to me, running is safe. I do what I used to think was a jog, but is probably faster than I can run when I'm me. Down Ali'i and then up the big hill to Keauhou shopping center, then up the bigger hill to the Queen's highway. I've run three miles up roads that are as close to straight up as any road I have ever been on, at 20 plus miles per hour, and it's nothing, not even breathing hard. As a side benefit, the running has dried my clothes.
At the top of the hill I turn right at the stop light, heading away from town, and put the hammer down. It doesn't look anything like it does on TV. Nothing appears to be moving fast, but it does. I think I'm getting sea sick. The rocks and grass are moving at normal speed and they are zooming by me at the same time.
I ignore the ground and focus on going faster. The air pushes back. Am I at the speed of sound? On the ground? Like a hound? Alright, so I am too happy being this fast and my inner Dr. Seuss is coming out. I work harder and push faster, even as the air fights back. And then there is no sound. Which means I'm found, on the ground, in one big bound.
A real thought hits me. If you can run 100 times as fast as a normal person, then you have to be able to think 100 times as fast as a normal person, your nerves have to impulse 100 times faster than normal, etc., etc., and I do not think any of that is happening. My brain is still the same screwed on sideways lumpy thing it always was.
I stop. I have traveled 10 miles or so up the road, in about a minute, my rough mental calculation says I averaged about the same speed as my 757 in total, though obviously faster at the end. I look back at where I have come, and utter one of my less nice epithets. The road is a disaster. I walk back toward town at normal human speed, passing my footprints which are about 15 feet apart, and six inches down into the road surface.
The spot where I broke the speed of sound is obvious too. I generated a shock wave, the same thing that creates a sonic boom. From where I stopped back to that spot the entire road is ripped, bent, torn. Lumps of asphalt litter what was the road surface, and the shoulders as well. Three miles of pavement are undriveable. My year's salary would not be enough to undo the damage I have done. Having fun. Without the sun. How could I be so dumb?
I go back to my 20 or so mile per hour jog, head into town, down the Kamehameha III road to Keauhou center, and back up Ali'i to the bay. The light is feeling sorry for me. It suggests flying. Which does not mean it says anything, I just suddenly know how to fly, and since I never did before, it must be my luminous friend.
Standing on the little strip of sand at the bay, next to the bathroom complex, my bare feet feel the sand beneath them as any feet feel any sand. I curl my toes and push the sand around. Then I let myself really touch the sand. The molecules are mine. I gather them beneath my feet and align them just so, they have force, and I can take it from them. I have them push and then I wish I hadn't.
If jumping was terrifying, flying is much, much worse. I am easily 400 feet up, easily moving at 400 knots, easily 400 feet out over the ocean, and easily again screaming like a little girl at 400 decibels.
I forgot to ask how to steer. I reach out for air molecules with my feet, the only body part I know how to find them with, and have them pull me back in. I'm standing on them, very high up, asking them nicely to put me down slowly. Molecules apparently don't understand English. They drop me, or I drop them, or we drop each other, but I manage to find them again after falling about 394 feet and screaming 3,940 times. So now I am standing on air, six feet above ground. I am still stupid enough to ask the molecules for a little push.
I discover that the sand on the beach is only a foot and a half deep. I discover that my head and neck together are less than that. I discover that whatever magical hair gel the light used on me is resistant to sand and impact. I discover it's dark under the ground.
Feeling even more stupid, I pull my head out of the beach's ass, and admire the further additional damage I have done this evening. I am done and WALKING back to the hotel, the light urging me to run the whole time. It's like a five year old whispering at me to go ahead and jump off the roof, it won't hurt, and the cape we made out of a bath towel will slow my fall. The sun's coming up anyhow, and I have no desire to be on YouTube.
I can bend steel in my bare hands. If there was a train, I'm sure I could kick the locomotive's ass. No bullet could beat me in the 40 yard dash. I can leap tall hotels screaming like a nine year old girl. I can cause more damage than humanly possible.
I pass one of the flight attendants out for her jog, say hey, and she completely ignores the come on from the unknown man. Good disguise at least. I think briefly about jumping up to my room, but figure that might cause too much of a commotion, so I head into the stairwell. It is a typical design, metal and concrete stairs in a square circle (you know what I mean), with an opening in the middle that goes all the way to the ceiling. I stand at the bottom and give in to the light, which is egging me on. I jump as straight up as I can, which is a stupid thing to do, turns out you can't steer while jumping either, and the light is not your friend. It laughs, at me now, not with me.
My head takes out the railing on the third floor, and I fall back to where I started. I am not hurt, but the railing will never rail again. I scoot up the stairs in long strides, landing to landing, cringing when I pass floor number three. Between the lock and the railing, I have cost the hotel at least a few hundred dollars, and some poor slob will need body work on his Civic. Not to mention destroying a road and damaging a beach. A night's experimenting and I obviously have a long way to go.
That last thought leads me to another thought: I have to pilot a plane in a couple hours, and I have gotten zero sleep. I open the door to my room, and standing just inside the closed door, reach inside myself to squeeze the light. My pants fall down. I toss them to the side, remove the now too large shirt, and go take another shower. I have had no sleep, but I feel more relaxed and refreshed than I normally do after 10 hours.
I meet my crew for the airport shuttle and we head for home. At 35,000 feet, I wonder how long it will be before I can do this without the 757. Then a little light reminds me that I have limited time. In something less than 1,094 days, I will be dead.
Chapter 5
Grabbing the molecules with my feet, I slam them hard at an angle and tilt my body toward the open sky above. Shooting less than straight upward, the dark gold colored glass windows of the Bank of California building come angling at me at an alarming rate, exactly what I was trying to avoid. I grab a few more molecules and shove away as hard as I can. Rocketing even faster now, I clear the top of the building without making contact, missing the windows by inches, my joy lasting a whole two seconds until I hear the unmistakable sound of shattering, and turn to watch helplessly as the shards from a dozen or more huge glass panes disappear below me in the night sky, falling to earth.
"Fuck me." Three mother fucking months of practicing almost every fucking night and I still can't get it right. Even the light doesn't find me funny any more. It's frustrated beyond belief, which makes my frustration all the more mind numbing.
A million dollars in road damage in Hawaii. Shattered windows from here to Vegas to Denver on my first attempt at cross country flight that not only went to four times the speed of sound (Mach 4 for you air buffs), not only caused tens of thousands of dollars of damage, but started at least forty conspiracy buff web sites on everything from alien space ships to secret air force planes to terrorist plots. It did teach me that I am almost, but not quite, invisible on radar. Further testing suggests that I am 100 percent stealthy, it's my clothes that are not. If you can figure out what I did to test that theory, keep it to yourself.
The worst was the first time I got cocky and tried to navigate downtown LA at high speed. I came home literally covered in shit. They are supposed to put the sewer pipes inside the frakking buildings, but nooooo, someone paid off some building inspector, and the budding superhero, going too fast, breaches the wall of an older brick building, busts the pipe, and finds himself covered in God knows what. Something that three showers was not enough to clear away.
I did learn that I can get from downtown LA out into deep water in well under three minutes. Of course, that also meant I was supersonic, which meant blown out windows from the 101 through South Central, northern Orange County and a couple coastal cities. It's also the only time I have flown directly home, which still has me worried someone saw something.
West Hawaii Today
confirmed not only my road damage, but that native Hawaiians are convinced that Pele was warning them of a major impending eruption from Kilauea. I've learned to run about 150 mph without causing damage, and been up to her volcano a couple of times to apologize with offerings of food (Twinkies actually, which she may not regard as food). The question is will I ever be faster on my feet than in a Ferrari? The real question is shouldn't Pele be happy with me for ripping up the white man's road? Couldn't she be helping me out with this powers thing? I do remember that she killed her husbands, so maybe I won't ask.
I'm convinced because of the view from inside the blurry that time is being affected around me. That's why I can run faster than my human brain should be able to control, and why everything looks normal and too fast all at that same time. It still makes me nauseous to travel top speed, in the air or on the ground.
I haven't saved one life, human or tree stuck feline, intercepted one drug shipment, fed one poor person, or gotten rid of one weapon of mass destruction, and I'm a few days away from the 1,000 days left on Earth mark.
The only saving grace is that I never sleep when in Hawaii anymore, and Halloween has no trouble with
her
superpowers, so I haven't had more than a 10 word conversation with the Fog Dude since May and it's September. He was obviously pissed at first, multicolored fog balls chasing me every time he swirled his way in, but has backed off, probably more concerned that maybe they picked a fucking idiot to give this stuff to who can't even fly correctly yet.
For at least the past month every time I fly downtown I have the sensation of being watched. It feels like when you're a kid doing something you know you shouldn't, turn around, and there's your mom watching you. I think it's Fog Dude's way of telling me to get my act together.