Invincible (16 page)

I play back the conversation in my head, pausing at every distinctive moment. The mention of a person named Davidson. The shock on Mr. Colfer’s face at the sound of the name.

Davidson. Was this the name of the man they were desperately searching for? The reason they had to discuss the rest o
f the situation in private?

“What was that all about?” Jack asks, the mumbles in his voice now replaced with a tone of curiosity.

“I’m not really sure,” I lie. “Is your dad always like this?”

“Yeah,” Jack says surprisingly. “Now that you’ve mentioned it, he has been a little on edge for the last couple of weeks. Probably stressed out from all of this.” He gestures towards the scientists.

“Are you sure?” I say.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. But I’m gonna find out.”

Jack starts walking, following in the same direction we came, and where his father had just left. I thought the workers would at least try to stop him, but they just continued working, completely oblivious to our presence.

“Jack!” I say, running after him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I always sneak around the building without my father knowing.”

“And you don’t get caught?”

“Nope. Not once.”

We walk to the elevator and notice one of the lights at the top of the doors fade away from the one of the numbers, and then slowly returns to the number of the floor we were on.

“Thirty-five,” Jack says. “That must be where they went.” The doors open. “Let’s go.”

We head inside, and Jack presses button Thirty-five. Then th
e doors close and we go upward.

The door opens and we walk into a long blue hallway—with a few small offices on either side and on one side a big open door. A lab door.

We run towards the door and hide behind one of the lab carts standing beside it. We peep into a massive lab, much bigger than the one that we’d just left, with rows of carts filled with test tubes, half-finished devices, formulas, schematics, warning signs, and in the center of it, a glass-enclosed chamber, with a gurney and restrained strains placed inside.

In front of the chamber, we notice Mr. Colfer, Dr. Walker, and two security guards staring at a thin man with brown
hair, who laughs hysterically.

“That’s enough,” Mr. Colfer says, his voice both a mixture of panic and frustration, the first being more obvious than the second. “Gentlemen, take him away.”

“No!” the man yells.

Suddenly, the guards are pause
d, and within the blink of an eye, they were thrown back against the wall, as if an invisible hand was having control of them.

There were no words for me to describe what I’d just witnessed. How could the guards be thrown like that, with no one to push them? Then I realized it was only one answer, and it was one that only
I would be able to understand.

Powers.

I look at Jack’s horrifying face as I put this together, and discovered something shocking. This was the Davidson guy everyone was talking about. This was why they had to find him, and keep him secret.

I snap out of my thoughts as I see Mr. Colfer and Dr. Walker trying to escape, running towards our way. But Dr. Walker is flown into the air, and thrown into the row of carts nearby. Mr. Colfer continues to run, but is abruptly stopped, and pulled back towards Davidson’s direction, his body shifted to face him.

“No,” Jack whispers. His feet begin to move, and I quickly try to reach for his arm, but he yanks away from me and heads full-speed into the lab, leaving me alone beside the door. “Dad!!”

With as much control as he could have over his body, Mr. Colfer stiffly turns his head, and an expression of disbelief crosses his face. “Jack!” he says. “No!”

Davidson laughs, and suddenly the lab cart that I hide behind begins to tremble. I immediately jerk away from the cart as it heads inside, watching it swing high into the air and then come down hard against Jack, slamming him onto the floor.

“No!” Mr. Colfer screams.

I couldn’t bare myself to watch anymore of this. If I did, it will only be a matter of seconds until Jack’s limp body would stop rising and falling, and Mr. Colfer would be a goner also, all at the hands of Davidson. Seeing them like this left me no other choice.

I turn around and remove my glasses, dropping my backpack as I rip off my normal clothes, revealing my jacket underneath, and pull on my gloves as I run towards the window at the end of the hallway. I throw myself out of the large transparent glass, and begin to fly around the building until I notice the small window that went directly into the lab. As soon as I found it, I crashed through the window, flying straight over to Da
vidson and kicking him into a wall.

A scream fills my ears, and as I look up, I see Mr. Colfer in the air, heading towards the ground. Luckily enough, I was able to reach out my arms and catch him.

“Run,” I command, putting him down. “Go!”

As Mr. Colfer runs over to retrieve Jack—whose head leaks an exceptional amount of blood—I turn my head and notice Davidson removing himself from the dent in the wall.

“You really should learn to respect your elders,” Davidson says. Then two gas tanks start floating behind him.

They both shoot towards me and I immediately run and jump over one of them, then punched another as it came, causing explosions to occur. As the smoke starts to clear, Davidson suddenly materializes in front of me, and punches me before I even had a chance
to move.

I am on the floor, trying to recover from the surprisingly powerful blow as Davidson walks over and stares at me.

“Impressive,” he says. “Now that we’ve got that out of our system, why don’t we get to know each other a little better, shall we?”

He then kneels down, and presses hi
s index finger to my forehead.

A sharp pain pierces through my body, a pain unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It was almost as worse as the feeling of my super-hearing when it was out of control, except now it was spread all over.

I’d spoke too soon. All the pain that was now eating away at my body began to travel to my brain, and it was then that I lost control.

I scream at the top of my lungs, my head splitting into fractions of three, my eyes rolling uncontrollably in my head as flashes of light blind my

eyes, going on and off, on and off. I wanted this to end already. Surely I would have to black out now. The pain was too strong to live through. Why wouldn’t it stop?

And just as I was about to pass out, Davidson’s finge
r and my forehead lose contact.

He then stands upright, and smiles.

“You are a brave young man, Troy Connor,” he says.

What was going on? Was I asleep? Was this a dr
eam? How did he know who I was?

“How?” I pant, my voice shot from all the yelling, drenched in sweat. “How do you know?”

He taps his forehead with two fingers. “That’s the power of mind-reading.” He then kneels down to me again. “How surprising, to see how confused you are. How afraid you are of me.”

“I’m not afraid,” I grunt, pushing on my hands to lift myself up.

“No!” he shouts. And I am forcibly sent back to the floor. “You are going to sit here and listen!!”

I was trapped. I didn’t know what to do. There was absolutely no way to escape or defeat him.

“How wonderful your gifts must be,” he says. “The power you possess is extraordinary. It’s quite interesting, really. It only makes me wonder…if I’ve gotten mine from you.”

I slowly lift my head, trying to get a good look at Davidson, struggling to process what he’d just said. What did he mean he got his powers from me? It was completely ridiculous. The chances of us getting our powers from the same source were one in a million.

Or was it?

“What
are you talking about?” I ask.

He slightly tilts his head, his eyes staring down at me with curiosity.

“You do not know?” he says. Then he pauses as if waiting for an answer, but unfortunately, one would never come. “How could you not know? How could you not remember what you are?”

Before I could ask him what he meant, a group of policemen rush into the lab, probably instructed by Mr. Colfer to intervene. They open fire and Davidson whips his head forward, the bullets heading toward our direction pausing abruptly, suspended in the air. He then turns them around, and shoots them back at the police. As I hear the sound of metal piercing flesh, my face hardens, and without even realizing it, I leap up and p
unch Davidson dead in his jaw.

He slides back to the dented wall, his eyes rolling in the back of his head, grunting in pain. I wanted to walk over to him, and demand he answer my question. But then I pause, hearing the footsteps of reinforcements coming down the hallway. I decide to let it go, because as much as I wanted to know what was going on with Davidson, I really didn’t want to stop them from taking the creep away. And there would be plenty of time to see him in custody
, when or wherever that may be.

So with that note, I take one more look at the supernatural scientist, and in frustration, fly away through the broken window.

Jack didn’t show up to school the next day, nor the day after that. I was starting to get worried about him. Was he okay? Did he lose all the blood in his h
ead? Does he have a concussion?

I felt guilty for not going to check on him, to see if he was okay after I left the lab. But I was so caught up with the demands of other people’s needs,

and going back to the lab after hours to retrieve my forgotten items, that I just lost track of time.

When I got home from school, my phone—one that Brad had gotten me a couple of days ago—rang, and when I realized it was Jack, I immediately ran to answer it.

“Jack,” I say, the tone in my voice both excited and worried. “How’s it going? Are you okay?”

There was a brief moment of silence before he responds.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice hoarse and dry as a sheet of sandpaper. “I’m fine.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at home, recovering.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. I was so relieved to hear his voice again that I completely forgot the words I had
planned to say when I saw him.

“What happened?” I ask warily. “What was wrong with your dad? Did they catch that guy?”

“I need to talk to you,” Jack says in an urgent manner.

“O-okay,” I say, my voice expressing my sudden confusion. “We can talk tomorrow-”

“No,” he snaps. “We need to talk. Now.”

I was starting to get scared. I wasn’t really sure as to why Jack would want to talk to me while he should be at home recovering. But then I remember after he was hit by the cart at the lab, his body deeply inhaling and exhaling, holding onto dear life, halfway unconscious, and I quickly start to panic.

“Um…uh,” I stammer, trying to think of a good excuse. “I could come to your house, and believe me, I could. But it’s getting kind of dark outside, and Brad’s not here. I don’t know how I’ll able to get there.”