The Ables (51 page)

He started walking toward me slowly. “Which is it going to be?” He took another step. “Actually … the choice is much more final than that, I suppose,” he said as he stopped walking. “It’s either embrace your destiny as ‘the one who can do all’ or die.”

“You’re going to kill me if I don’t suddenly sprout a million different powers?”

He chuckled. “No, son. I’m not going to kill you.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled a small black box out of his pocket. “This … is going to kill you. Providing, of course, that you don’t dig down deep and find a way to stop it.”

He turned and waved at the school. “This building is pretty impressive, don’t you think?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s state of the art—hell, a lot of things in Freepoint are, am I right?” He looked around with a fake sense of nostalgia. “I think it’s going to be sad to see it all decimated.”

I looked at Henry and then back at Granddad, a nervous pit growing in my stomach.

“Underneath that school, actually, just a few yards away from where your dad—my do-gooder son—and all the other prisoners are being held, is a special plan I saved as a last resort in case you wouldn’t listen to reason. Always plan for contingencies,” he added as a twisted bit of grandfatherly wisdom. “My contingency plan is a three-ton atomic bomb, Phillip, with enough power to wipe out the whole city and kill a few hundred thousand citizens around the state with radiation poisoning as well.”

The pit began to grow rapidly.

He kept going. “And when I push this button right here, you, Phillip, will be the only thing that can save them. And I’m willing to bet, when you’re faced with certain death and tragic loss for that many people, you’ll find something inside you that you didn’t know was there. You’re the unlikely hero after all, don’t you know? I should have made this my first plan instead of just trying to talk to you, because the prophecy basically calls for you to have your coming-out party by saving the day.”

“I don’t have these powers! Please,” I begged, “you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Shh, shh, shh,” he said, like a mother trying to calm down a screaming child. “We’re about to find out, Phillip.”

***

“Go! Now!” Bentley shouted.

James reached out his hands, corralling the wrists and fingers of everyone in the closet, until he was sure he was touching everyone.

Ooph!

They all disappeared and then reappeared together in the hallway.

“What the—“ The guards were startled, but my friends leaped into action too quickly for them. Patrick, showing his own remarkable jump in the use of his newfound powers, sped into the supply closet, grabbed a rolled-up garden hose, and wrapped it around the two guards dozens of times by circling them—all within two seconds time.

That left enough time for Freddie and James to push the two stumbling goons into the supply closet and lock it as Patrick finished securing the hose.

High fives were exchanged as the group took a moment to savor their spontaneous little victory. As reality set in, each of them slowly began to turn their heads until they were all looking at the detention room door and the trapped heroes inside. Dad stood at the front of the pack, his face contorted in shock at what he’d just witnessed.

“Oh yeah,” Bentley said sheepishly. “Who’s got the key?”

Finch had been too cocky to consider any kind of prison break a possibility, and had therefore only activated his own NPZ over the field, ignoring the school completely. In a flash, a small army of Freepoint’s finest heroes, including my father, appeared behind me.

“What’s this?” Thomas asked no one in particular, somewhat startled by the sight. It was already too late, as there’d been one NPZ hero confined with my father in the makeshift prison—his partner from the ambush in Donnie’s room at the hospital—and he’d activated his ability the moment he arrived.

I lost the images my grandfather had been sending me but instantly regained the ones from Henry. I looked around to get a feel for things. Behind me I saw a large number of my city’s adults—we easily outnumbered the enemy two to one now. About twenty yards behind me, on my left, was my father. He was staring straight at the man who had tormented me for eight months.

“Dad?” He asked, well beyond confused.

The old villain looked up and locked eyes with Dad. “Hello, son.” There was a kindness and warmth to his voice, which vanished immediately on the next sentence. “You’ve raised an interfering little bastard here, you know that?” He gestured at me.

Dad smiled nervously with a combination of concern and pride.

“What are you … doing here … alive?” Dad was bewildered.

“Dad, Finch is Grandpa. He’s been the one behind it all along,” I said rather urgently, hoping to get him acclimated quickly to the situation. We didn’t have time to stop for every new arrival and retell the story to this point.

“Phillip,” Bentley blurted out, unable to control himself. “He’s got a bomb.”

“I know,” I said, pointing at the black box my grandfather held in his hand.

Quite cooperatively, he held it up in the air for all to see.

“Everybody freeze,” one of Dad’s protector buddies yelled. “Nobody moves an inch!”

“I’m willing to stay put,” Thomas said playfully, “but I don’t really think you’re going to play by those rules yourself if I do. And you’ve got all those super powers over there on your side, while I only have this little black box. So I think I’ll keep my thumb right here on the trigger for a while and do damn well what I please.”

He turned and looked straight at Dad. “Son,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to have our own reunion later, after your son saves the day. Right now, I have more pressing issues to deal with than a trip down memory lane. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d hush up for a while and let your son and me talk, okay?”

Dad was stunned, still reeling from the new knowledge that his father was even alive. He looked at me, then at his own father … then back at me.

“Phillip,” said Thomas in a tone that was almost chipper, “what your friends discovered down there in that basement is part of a three-stage bomb. That means there will be three separate steps to the process. There is, of course, no added advantage to using multiple explosions—the end result will be the same level of devastation. But I wanted something visceral to trigger your powers.”

“I don’t—“

He cut me off. “The first stage is your basic dynamite, and that’ll just blow out the windows and doors. Sure, it’ll make a pretty gigantic thump in your chest—I mean, you’ll know it’s for real at that point.” He smiled the way someone does who is telling a favorite story they’ve told a million times. “The second explosion, well, that’s C4, and that’ll wipe out the school … probably send plenty of debris here into the field … might even hurt someone. That explosion is designed to really sock it to you—you in particular, Phillip. If, somehow, the first wave doesn’t kick in your instinctive God-given abilities, then we’ll have to wait for the second. And it will do the trick, I’m sure. You’ve been through a lot in the last year, but you’ve never been this close to a few dozen pounds of C4. That kind of explosion will make Navy SEALs soil themselves.”

And then he just stopped, almost as though he was waiting for something.

“And the final stage?” I finally said, remembering that this was all a carefully choreographed and scripted affair for my grandfather, almost like a play reenacting his grand vision for this moment.

“Well, if it comes to that, there’s no going back. That’s the nuclear option—literally.” He took a few steps toward me and was now only a few feet away. “Phillip, if those first two explosions don’t wake up the powers I know to be inside you … then I don’t want to live, and none of you deserve to … so we’ll all die. Together. But,” he chuckled, “I am not remotely worried about it. You are the one I’ve been searching for these last forty years, Phillip. I know it as strongly as I’ve ever known anything in my life.

“Of course,” he said, as though he’d just remembered something, “I only have the one trigger. Once I push this button, there’ll be no turning back, son. And at that point, if you can’t save us … no one can.” He leaned down, smiling knowingly. “You sure you don’t just want to tell us the truth about your powers?”

I lifted my head so I was looking directly at his eyes. “I have told you all the truth I know about my powers.”

“Ah,” he said, following it with a sigh.

“Please don’t do this,” I said, figuring it was worth one more shot to try and talk this maniac down from the fiction he’d built in his mind. “Please, I promise you … I don’t have the powers you think I do.”

“But you do, Phillip! You do have them! Just like the baby bird who inches up to the edge of the nest, never really sure that his wings will keep him airborne until his parents push him out, and he faces the cold, stark reality that he is, indeed,
falling
. It is I, Phillip, who promise
you …
you do have them. And as soon as you realize it, I’ll have them too.
Then
let’s see them try to stop us.”

I looked down to the ground, trying to make peace with the fact that I was about to die.

“At least let these people go,” I said, grasping at straws. “You don’t need to put them at risk when all you want is me.”

“Ah, but I do! I do have to. You see … this,” he gestured to the field around him, “is your
nest
, young man. And I can tell you’ve already made your peace with the fact that death is a possible outcome of our little standoff here. That’s why I need these people here, so that you’ll have a motivated reason to want to save them … to want to flex your muscles and stop my bomb. Your friends … your teachers … your father,” he looked at Dad and then right back to me, “they’ll all be dead in a few short seconds if you aren’t able to save them.”

“Dad,” my father said softly with a noticeable quiver of emotion in his voice. “Whatever this is … don’t do this.”

Thomas looked at my father, not as a father looks at his son, but as a police officer looks at a deadbeat criminal: with disdain. “If your sad puppy-dog eyes didn’t keep me from turning my back on you when you were a kid, what makes you think they’re going to work now? Don’t be so weak, John, it’s
always
been your biggest flaw.”

He lifted the black box with his left hand and moved his thumb over button.

“No!” I yelled.

“Dad!” My father shouted.

“If I’m right, we’ll see you in a few moments, Phillip. If I’m wrong … well, I’m going to be pretty upset that I wasted an entire year on you.” And with that, he depressed the button.

Almost immediately, there was a large, rumbling explosion. It shook the ground on which we stood and was followed immediately by the ear-piercing sound of a thousand panes of glass shattering, as each of the school’s windows blew out in spectacular fashion.

“You’d better hurry up and do something, Phillip. I can’t stop it now!” Thomas cackled. He was genuinely enjoying the carnage.

The second explosion came only a few short seconds later and made the first look like a child’s firecracker.

The force of the blast knocked me to the ground and sent me tumbling as the school walls burst into thousands of pieces. Debris flew everywhere. Finch had guessed right, and hunks of concrete and metal smacked into some of the custodians on both sides of the battle, sending them flying and knocking some of them unconscious.

I’ll remember the sound of that second explosion forever. It started with the roar of a jet engine but was quickly replaced by silence, as the sheer decibel level of the blast momentarily deafened me. When it returned, it did so in a pulsing scream.

I looked up from my prone position in the direction of my grandfather. My images had changed again, and I instantly could tell I was receiving pictures from him and not from Henry. The blast must have incapacitated Dad’s partner who had been holding Thomas and his men at bay with the NPZ. I whipped my head to the right, only to find Henry’s empty wheelchair tipped over on its side. Henry was twenty feet away, passed out, with flaming chunks of school property set around him like sentries.

I looked left to where my father was and saw him face down on the ground. Behind him, most of the rest of the hero force had been wiped out or knocked clear by the explosion. Even most of Thomas’ men were out of commission.

Twenty yards away, I saw Freddie grow rapidly to his full-empowered size—probably out of instinctive reaction—and then immediately shrink again, gasping for breath.

I turned back to look at the school, only to see a horrific, charred shell of a building. A few support walls still stood, and the building’s foundational outline was intact. But it was otherwise leveled, burning, and in pieces.

I had been correct. I did not have all the powers in the world, and hidden abilities had not been awakened by Thomas’s final, violent catalyst. I was just a regular old blind kid with some fairly cool telekinetic powers. But I was no Elben.

Frankly, it was a relief. I’d rather face death than the prospect of joining forces with such an evil person … or being his prisoner for the rest of my life, while he milked my powers for his own gain.

I looked at his eyes and slowly rose to my feet, my gaze never wavering. I said nothing. I did nothing. My silent fortitude conveyed my message entirely: I cannot stop you, but I will not yield to you.

Screw you, Grandpa.

For a moment, he seemed surprised. His eyes widened. Fires raged throughout the treetops above us, dropping ash and ember all around us. I knew what came next, and I knew I couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t even going to try anymore.

My father’s father looked around, surveying the damage and taking in all he’d lost in his pursuit of what he thought was a sure thing. He looked back to me. His eyes flashed with defiance. Suddenly, he was directly in front of me, having teleported inches from my position. More than half his face, from his lower left jaw to his upper right temple, was mangled in raised, discolored scarring. Artimus must have hit him square in the face with that lightning bolt on that night so many years ago. He shook his wiry, wrinkled finger in my face, silently scolding me. Then he leaned down quickly to my ear. “I’m very disappointed in you, grandson.”