Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (25 page)

“Okay, so what do we do?”

“See who Jackson talks to. I think he really
has to be close to somebody to mess with their heads. We can see if
they do anything funny.”

“He doesn’t have to talk to them…he can just
put a thought inside your head.”

“Probably,” she said, “but he has to look at
them and concentrate. I should know.” He suddenly wondered how
exactly she had turned into his grandfather…or where she’d gotten
the picture of him.

“So we watch who he
looks
at?” he
asked.

“You don’t really have any better ideas…"

The only thing Michael was sure of, when he
thought of all those teachers in one big room, as that there would
be trouble. As if one teacher in the classroom wasn’t bad
enough.

Until this teachers meeting got underway and
Michael did some detective work, he still had all his normal
homework, plus make up work. It wasn’t just reading and writing
itself, as his mother reminded him time and again. His grades were
slipping. He knew it. He wasn’t even going to get out of LADCEMS,
or he’d spend all summer in school instead, working and studying
even more, not enjoying any of his free time out in the sun.

He tried to get some work done, and for a
while he succeeded. Math was hard, but most of it he could check by
calculator, and Grandpa was always on hand to explain something
again. But when it came to reading short stories about kids
planting flowers on top of a building, he just couldn’t understand
it. What was the point, and more than that, who decided that this
was the important stuff? There was one story about a mechanical
house after the nuclear bomb went off, and the house was always
trying to feed the people that were dead and gone. And really, that
story was incredible! What was all this other stuff?

It generally took him two hours to get
through a fifteen page short story, because of all the times he
would get distracted. Philip Pullman would interrupt, or Neil
Gaiman. They were far more interesting than this. He started
wishing for another telepath who could fix his brain so he’d at
least be able to concentrate and get this stupid book out from in
front of him. He could answer the stupid questions and get to work
forgetting all of it.

The teachers’ meeting wasn’t for another few
days. He met with Charlotte at lunch time and talked over the plan
in the library while she pretended to help him study the extra
stuff he was missing. After school, she would often show up and
follow him along his paper route, changing into different people
she’d seen in school, or their teachers. She did this great
impression of, well, everybody, since she could mimic their voice
completely.

“How did…I mean, what happened?” he
asked.

“How I got Activated?” she asked. “Yeah,
well, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom one day getting ready
for school, and I was looking down at the floor, right? There’s
this pebbly glass window, it’s really not big, but the most amazing
light comes through it. We had this little breeze, and the sunlight
was shining in, and the pebbles were making these little rainbow
sparklies all over the floor and up and down my bathroom. And, I
mean, for a few days I was having a really great time hanging out
with you, we were listening to Parliament Funkadelic, James Brown,
you remember, right?”

“Uh, right…and Stone and his family, right?”
Michael hadn’t gotten into music with Charlotte for so long that he
missed it. P-funk was from the 1970’s, all velvety smooth horns and
really slick lyrics, fun stuff you always found yourself smiling
at.

“Sly and the Family Stone, the Meters, yeah,”
she said. “I was really into it. More into it than the grunge
stuff. And later was getting into the Afrobeat work, mostly Fela
Kuti. Really organic and, just, wow sort of stuff. Anyway one of
the twins came into the bathroom and said I looked like a rainbow.
Must have been the glass and the music. I just went
multicolored.”

Of course she would. That was the thing about
Charlotte that Michael would always appreciate and love, but never
understand. If he Activated it would be all fire and screaming, he
would be one of those who killed people when he went. But
Charlotte, she was able to see the beauty in basically
everything.

“Then I got a headache and passed out. When I
woke up I was in that room under Patterson.”

“And you just do voices and, like, change
into people.”

She shook her head. “They don’t know. We did
a lot of tests, but they’re still not sure. They think I don’t
actually change into anybody, it’s more like a telepathic
projection.”

“You just appear like that in my head,” he
said.

“Yeah.”

“Even though my eyes pick up your real
image.” This was a science concept from not long ago. “It’s
like…what, a mirage?”

She nodded. “We see things that aren’t really
there all the time. Yeah, you can see liquid pavement on a hot day,
it’s just the way the light hits the asphalt.”

They stopped.

“You see that?” she asked. He looked.

About five blocks down, across the main
street, an ambulance and three police cars were flashing their blue
and reds. Michael couldn’t tell anything from this far off, but he
knew the town well enough to know that three police cars was the
limit. There probably weren’t five police cars in the whole town,
so three was definitely sixty percent at least.

“Hooray mental math,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Thinking out loud, sorry.”

“Do you want to…” she asked, and gave him a
careful look.

“Um, no?”

“Come on Michael. This could be really
important!”

“You know what’s going to happen to me if
Jackson finds out?” he said. “Or my mom for that matter? I don’t
know which one’s worse.” Oh man did he ever look like a whiny
mama’s boy on this one. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t want to get
into anymore trouble. This teachers meeting plan had him jumpy. One
teacher at a time was plenty bad enough, but more than fifty
teachers all in the same place, ugh.

She smiled at him. “Okay, I’ll report back
when I’m done. You’re headed to the library right now, right?”

After a good ten seconds he said, “Oh all
right.”

It was still too far off when they saw the
stretcher come out of the house, but Michael thought he saw a
splash of red on the white cloth over the person. He didn’t think
there was anything showing, nothing peeking out of the white cloth
either. Like they’d draped it over the whole person.

Or the whole body.

Michael hadn’t seen his own mangled body when
he fell from the ceiling of the gymnasium that day, and hadn’t been
in the gym to see the horror show for the first assembly. He hadn’t
seen Mr. Samuelson’s smoking shoulder burn when Trent attacked
either. He hadn’t seen anybody dead. He didn’t want to. Nobody in
his family had died except Nan and Gramps, his mother’s parents,
but that didn’t count since he was like two when it happened.

He probably wouldn’t get his chance here
either.

“Do you think they’re…” Charlotte didn’t
ask.

“Don’t know,” he lied. They were only three
blocks off now, and these weren’t the long blocks either. He had
this bad feeling like paramedics didn’t take their time with the
live ones.

“You ready to go yet?” he asked her.

She wasn't, and instead of going, they got
even closer. Another car showed up as they were only about a block
away, and who got out but Grandpa.

Charlotte squeezed his arm hard. He could
understand her fear. Michael couldn't grasp how deeply into the
town's workings his grandfather really was. Grandpa disappeared
into the dead person's house as the ambulance pulled slowly away,
lights off. Yep, whoever that was was dead.

“We need to get you behind some cover,”
Charlotte said.

“What about you?” he said automatically.

“Don't worry,” she said in a cracked, jovial
voice. When he turned back she was replaced with an eighty year old
woman Michael vaguely recognized as Charlotte's neighbor.

“Gone now, git,” she said, and followed it
with an old lady's cackle.

Michael hopped a fence into somebody's
backyard and began to shadow Charlotte as best he could. He didn't
know these houses like he knew the ones on his route, but he'd
learned enough in the past three years to know which houses had
dogs. You just looked for the digging marks under the fences, or
the scattered piles of poop. As for the people who were home, that
was a little harder. Most people though, they had a real hard time
seeing out their backyard windows. If they weren't already out
there, they could ignore everything short of a crash landing jumbo
jet. Finally he hopped the fence into the dead person's backyard.
He had a sudden clear flash of his time under the library, and Mr.
Z shouting into the phone that he didn't care if she swallowed a
ton of sleeping pills to kill herself.

He landed just behind the garage, and knew
right away it was a woman's house. People didn't just have
birdbaths tied with red ribbons or those gazebo things. This
woman's yard was at least double the size of Michael's, though the
garage was smaller. The hedges were too neatly cut, there were all
together too many flowers, and, there was the clincher, a pink
butterfly thermometer/barometer suctioned to the sliding glass
doors.

Grandpa came up to the sliding glass doors
and poked his head out. “You sure nobody came in or out?”

Another man arrived, and pushed his way out
onto the flagstones. He quickly lit a cigarette and raked a hand
through his thinning hair. He looked about forty, and probably
wouldn't have any hair left by the time he hit fifty. What he
lacked in hair he made up for in stomach. It was so big his belt
was just a rumor.

“You see what she did to herself?” the fat
detective asked. “Whew.”

“I’m aware of her condition, yes. You didn’t
answer my question.”

“You know Zeus, he's got eyes and ears on
this place all the time,” the fat man said.

“I wasn't aware we made Zeus and his flunkies
into detectives, detective.”

The fat man sighed. “I'll look into it,
sir.”

“You do that,” Grandpa said. “I'm tired of
this situation and not getting any answers out of it.”

“What situation? Wait, you don't think this
Lane woman has anything to do with what's going on at school, do
you?”

“I ain't prepared to take any chances,
Ricardo. The timing is awfully bad.”

Michael tried to think where he'd seen a Mrs.
or Ms. Lane before, and couldn't. He wasn't a very friendly kid. He
knew Frodo and Percy Jackson far better than he did the people who
cut hair or sold his mother deli turkey.

“Well you best have some answers for me,”
Grandpa said. “I'm gettin' fed up with explaining patience to the
regents.”

“Yes sir,” Ricardo said.

Michael made his way back over the fence when
he was sure Grandpa and detective Ricardo Fatbelly were back inside
and out of the dead lady's kitchen. Charlotte was a couple of
blocks up, still as an old lady, still clucking her tongue and
muttering about what a shame it was.

“What'd you find out?” she asked him in her
own voice.

He told her about the late Lane woman, and
how Grandpa thought it was connected to whatever was happening to
all the kids at LADCEMS. He left out the part about Zeus and the
keys. He didn't know why, but it just felt wrong to tell someone
like Charlotte that there really was a secret conspiracy
headquarters watching after everyone they thought was important.
Like it would stain her somehow.

She told him how she'd walked up and started
talking about the poor, poor dear, the poor dear. The cops had told
her that yes, it was a shame, and she needed to move on.
Unfortunately she couldn't get a look in the lady's house, even
when she said she was a friend of the deceased. But she did hear a
couple of the cops inside talking about how messed up the lady was,
never married, probably just time to do the deed.

“What do you think that means, do the deed?”
she asked.

“Kill herself,” Michael said immediately, and
went on quickly when he saw how Charlotte was looking at him.
“People who are messed up, you know, sometimes they kill
themselves. I've read it in books.”

“Reading things in books doesn't make them
true,” she said quietly. There it was, the subdued Charlotte he
didn't like. Everything else she did was so vibrant, so real and
true and happy, he didn't want to burden her with this black smudge
of possible reality. He decided to change tactics.

“Let's finish up the plan for the teachers
meeting,” he said. “I've still got some issues with the plan and I
need your ideas.”

“Alright,” she sighed.

After a few blocks, they turned back toward
the library, and by the time they got there Charlotte was back to
her old self. She was excited to see if they could find something
at the meeting. Michael just hoped they didn't waste a whole lot of
time, or get caught, but she was convinced the problem was there
and they just had to work to find it. Michael just hoped he
wouldn't get caught and killed by his mother and father.

In the meantime he had to ask about the Lane
woman. She had to be one of the Keys. After dropping Charlotte at
home, Michael headed back to the library to have a chat with
Lily.

Her name was Johanna Lane, thirty-one years
old, and for fifteen of those, an Active. She could read and
control peoples’ dreams. Lily told him all this sadly, like Ms.
Lane was a good friend. Perhaps she was. Michael didn’t know how to
ask, how to try to comfort someone much older. From his mother at
least, he expected that all adults built up some sort of layer of
armor, and that they didn’t need anyone when things got tough. Then
again, there was his father.