The Omega Superhero (Book 2): Trials Read online

  TRIALS

  THE OMEGA SUPERHERO

  BOOK ONE

  By Darius Brasher

  If you have not already done so, you can check out the first book in the Omega Superhero Series here:

  CAPED: THE OMEGA SUPERHERO, BOOK ONE

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  DARIUS BRASHER’S NEWSLETTER

  Trials Copyright © 2017 by Darius Brasher.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by RMG Book Cover Designs.

  First Edition, Published February 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EXCERPT FROM SUPERHERO DETECTIVE FOR HIRE

  CHAPTER 1

  Two of the five bank robbers had their guns aimed at my head. One held a pistol, the other a sawed-off shotgun. I stood facing the two masked men with my hands over my head.

  I calmly said to them, “You fellas don’t know it yet, but you’re having a really bad day.”

  Robber and victim alike looking at me in disbelief. My fellow customers and the bank employees lay cowering on the floor. The three remaining masked robbers had their guns pointed at the prostrated people.

  “This dude’s crazy,” the robber with the shotgun said. The shotgun shook a little. The man’s eyes were wild behind his mask. He sounded young. Late teens, early twenties, tops. Around my age.

  “Boy, I ain’t gonna to tell you again—get your narrow ass on the floor,” the robber with the pistol said to me. He waved his gun menacingly.

  “Here’s a counter-proposal,” I said. “You five drop your weapons, run out of here, and we’ll all forget this unpleasantness ever happened.”

  “How about I drop you instead?” Pistol said.

  “As appealing as your offer is, I must decline.”

  Pistol shook his head in disbelief.

  “There’s always some jackass who wants to play the hero,” he said. “Well I warned you.”

  Pistol pulled the trigger. The blast of the gun echoed off the bank’s high ceiling. Some of the people on the floor screamed.

  Pistol was a good shot. The bullet rocketed towards the center of my forehead.

  It stopped in mid-air, an inch from my skull. The bullet hovered there, spinning like a top.

  There was dead silence in the bank for a moment. Shock was in the eyes of both the robbers and the victims.

  “Fuuuuuck!” Pistol said, drawing the word out in disgust. “He’s one of those Metahuman freaks.”

  “If by ‘Metahuman freak’ you mean Hero, then yeah, that’s me. ‘That is I,’ if you’re a grammar snob,” I said. Actually, I was merely a Hero’s Apprentice. I hadn’t passed the Trials and gotten my Hero’s license yet, but Pistol didn’t need to know all that. “And guess what that makes you? If you were gonna say ‘screwed,’ then you guessed right. If you were gonna say ‘clichéd,’ that’s a good guess too. Who tries to rob a bank in person anymore? Ever heard of computer hacking? Which one of you is Bonnie, and which one is Clyde?”

  Pistol wasn’t as impressed by my spiel as I was.

  He yelled, “Let him have it!”

  All the robbers’ guns turned on me. They fired almost simultaneously. It was like watching a firing squad. Unfortunately, I was on the receiving end of this one.

  The sound of the multiple guns firing was deafening, like standing in the middle of a Fourth of July fireworks display. The sound swallowed the shrieks of the victims on the floor.

  When the crooks stopped firing, the silence seemed equally deafening by contrast. The robbers undoubtedly expected me to be lying on the floor, dead or dying.

  I was not.

  “Holy shit!” one of the robbers exclaimed.

  I still stood, completely unharmed by the bullets and the shotgun pellets. The projectiles hung in the air, suspended around me in my invisible force field, like metal flies trapped in amber. I felt a rush of adrenaline. Winston Churchill had been right: There was nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

  Jaws dropped as people stared at me. From their perspective, it probably looked like I was surrounded by a tiny asteroid field. Unlike the first bullet Pistol had shot which was still spinning only an inch from my head, the other bits of ammunition ranged from a foot to a foot and a half away from me. I had been showing off a little when I had let the first bullet from Pistol get so close. When stopping multiple projectiles, I hadn’t wanted to cut it as close. If I had messed up and let myself get shot to pieces trying to show off again, Myth and Smoke, my fellow Hero Apprentices, would visit my grave to alternate between grieving for and making fun of me.

  My raised hands, now clenched tight, burned the way they always did when I exerted my telekinetic powers. I used a tiny bit of my focus to use my powers to pull my hoodie’s hood up over my head to help protect my identity. The robbers had already disabled the bank’s cameras, but I wanted to make it harder for the people in the bank to remember me. I didn’t have my mask and costume on as I hadn’t expected to use my powers in a routine trip to the bank. Lesson learned. Maybe I needed to start taking my mask to the bathroom, too.

  “Wow,” I said, still in a calm voice as the bullets and pellets hovered around me, “every single one of you missed. From close-range, too. What are the odds? They really don’t make robbers like they used to.” I shook my head in sham sorrow. “I’ll bet I’m a better shot than you guys. It would be hard not to be. Let’s find out.”

  I concentrated, exerting my will. I flung my hands wide open, releasing the kinetic energy I had stored from stopping the bullets and pellets.

  The hovering projectiles shot out from around me like shrapnel from an exploding grenade. They made a slight whistling sound through the air. They rocketed toward the five robbers, striking every one of them.

  The robbers howled and cursed in pain. Three fell over. Despite the fact they were yelling bloody murder, I had been careful to hit them all in non-vital areas. I was trying to hurt them, not kill them. I wouldn’t have shot them at all if one of them hadn’t backhanded an obviously pregnant lady earlier when she did not hit the floor quickly enough to suit him. That had pissed me off.

  I had already frozen the triggers of the men’s
guns to prevent them from firing more and maybe hurting one of the customers or employees. Now, I used my telekinesis to rip the guns from the men’s hands. I floated them overhead, out of reach.

  I picked the bleeding men up, holding them inches off the ground. Confused cries mingled with pained ones. They windmilled their legs and feet, but they couldn’t budge an iota from where they hovered. They reminded me of Wile E. Coyote trying to run in midair after chasing the Road Runner off the edge of a cliff.

  With flicks of my wrist, I sent the hovering men flying through the air. They all slammed back-first against the far wall. They cried out again in pain. Their feet still dangled off the ground. Despite their struggling against the force of my powers, I kept the men pinned to the wall like dead roaches in an entomologist’s collection. Still using my powers, I ripped their ski masks off. Two whites, one black, one Asian, one Hispanic. It was the United Nations of douchebaggery. Their faces were contorted with pain.

  Except for Pistol’s, that is. He glared at me with hate in his eyes.

  “I’ll get you for this you little piece of sh—” Pistol’s voice became an angry mumble when I forced his mouth shut with my powers. That little trick would come in handy if I ever had potty-mouthed children.

  “Who knows how to handle a gun?” I said to the frightened people still on the floor.

  No one responded. They just looked at the men dangling against the wall and back at me like I was some sort of wizard who might turn everyone into frogs. I suppressed a sigh. Though I was accustomed to being around Metas, not everyone had seen Metahuman powers in operation close-up. I probably scared these people as much as the robbers had. I wished I had my costume and cape on. People knew a cape usually signified a Hero.

  I said, “Come on, speak up. I have the situation under control. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  “I’m ex-military,” someone said. It was the pregnant woman the robber had slapped. She struggled to her feet. Though otherwise slender, she looked like she was smuggling a beach ball under her smock. If she hadn’t been pregnant, she would barely be a hundred pounds dripping wet. Ex-military, huh? It further proved you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.

  “Keep these knuckleheads covered until the police arrive,” I said to her, floating one of the robber’s pistols into her hands. She moved the gun’s slide back slightly and checked the chamber for a bullet like a pro. Adopting a shooter’s stance and holding it in both hands, she pointed the gun at the robber in the middle of my wall of Dillinger wannabes.

  Emboldened—or maybe shamed—by the pregnant woman’s example, a few other people got up and said they knew how to handle firearms. I dropped guns into their hands as well. The bank guard, whom the robbers had disarmed when they first came in, was the fourth person to get up and be given a gun. A portly man wearing a manager’s tag on his blazer looked at the guard with obvious disgust. Though clairvoyance wasn’t in my power set, it wasn’t hard to guess the guard wouldn’t have a job by the close of business.

  By now, everyone was back on his feet.

  “I don’t know how to thank you, young man,” the bank manager said. His fleshy face was flush from fright and excitement. “The police should be on their way. I hit the silent alarm before these thugs dragged me from my desk.”

  As if on cue, I heard sirens in the distance.

  “Oh my God, you were amazing,” cooed a blonde girl around my age. She flung herself into my arms. She pawed me like I was a rock star and she was groupie. I let her, even though I needed to get out of here before the police showed up.

  You are amazing too, I wanted to say to the girl. She was very attractive. Despite my powers, I was still a 20-year-old guy. It was hard to say no to a hot blonde when she wanted a hug.

  Come to think of it, it was hard to say no to a hot anything. Even Metahumans were only human.

  I had noticed the blonde before, when she had come into bank after me. Like clairvoyance, detecting hot girls was not one of my superpowers, but it may as well have been since I was so good at it. This one was chattering a mile a minute.

  “What’s your name? Are you famous? Can I get your autograph? How about a selfie? Can you fly? Shoot lasers out of your eyes? What other cool stuff can you do?” she gushed breathlessly.

  “Uh, my name’s not important,” I said, suddenly embarrassed by the barrage of questions, not to mention the softness of the girl’s well-developed body pressing against me. “I’m just glad everyone’s okay and that I was here to help.” I could have told her my code name, Kinetic, or my real name, Theodore Conley, but I didn’t want to blow my secret identity. I wasn’t in costume, after all. The first rule of having a secret identity was to not talk about your secret identity.

  Reluctantly, I gently untangled myself from the girl. I needed to get out of here. As an unlicensed Hero’s Apprentice, it was illegal for me to use my powers unless I was under the direct supervision of Amazing Man, my Hero sponsor. An exception to that general rule was an imminent threat to public safety. An attempted bank robbery probably counted as such a threat, but I had no interest in arguing the intricacies of the Hero Act of 1945 with the cops. They might arrest me along with the robbers and let the lawyers sort it all out later. I had already been to jail once for unauthorized use of my powers some time ago when I used them to defeat Iceburn, the superpowered assassin who had been hired to kill me.

  I didn’t want to repeat my jailbird experience. As Myth was fond of saying, I was too pretty to go back to jail. If I did, I would wind up being someone’s girlfriend, Myth had predicted. He had used a stronger word than “girlfriend,” though.

  I released my hold on the men pinned to the wall. Three collapsed onto the floor; the other two were able to remain on their feet. The people with the guns had them covered.

  With the scent of the blonde’s perfume on me, I strode to the bank’s revolving glass door. A chorus of “thank you”s followed in my wake.

  I hadn’t gotten out fast enough. Flashing police lights greeted me as soon as I was outside. The street was lined with the red, white, and blue cars of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police. Multiple guns pointed at me. As Yogi Berra said, it was déjà vu all over again.

  “Put your hands up where we can see them,” came the voice of one of the cops.

  “Sure thing, officer,” I said, raising my hands yet again. Arms up, arms down, arms up, arms down. Who knew a trip to the bank would give me this kind of upper body workout?

  I sprang into the air, using my powers to rapidly rise high over the heads of the assembled police. Their shouts receded below me. In seconds, the cops were mere specks below me. No one shot at me. It was good to see that these cops didn’t have itchy trigger fingers.

  I looked down at the landscape below. South of me, I spotted the Washington Monument, the tallest structure in the District of Columbia. I had taken the subway to Chinatown to go to my bank rather than flying there, so I didn’t know how to get home by air without using a landmark to orient me.

  I shot off in a northwestern direction, towards Amazing Man’s mansion in Chevy Chase, Maryland where I lived with him, Myth, and Smoke. I would have to do my banking later. The Old Man—that was what we Apprentices called Amazing Man, but never to his face—was a very wealthy man, and he paid his Apprentices a hefty salary. Thanks to that, and the fact I didn’t have any living expenses to speak of as Amazing Man also provided room and board, I had more money in the bank than any 20-year-old farmer’s son had any business having. In all honesty, we Apprentices should have been paying Amazing Man rather than the other way around. We had learned so much about being a Hero from him in the two years we had been his Apprentices.

  As I flew homeward, I thought about how I had handled things in the bank.

  Not bad for a South Carolina farm boy, I thought with satisfaction.

  I was pretty pleased with myself. I had foiled the robbery, disarmed the robbers, all but gift-wrapped them for the cops, and had a pretty girl call me
amazing, all without anyone getting hurt. Anyone except the robbers, that is. That jackass really shouldn’t have slapped that pregnant lady.

  Before I had become the Old Man’s Apprentice, there was no way I would have handled the situation in the bank so easily. The Old Man himself couldn’t have done a better job, I thought. Plus, I had done it with style. I thought that Bonnie and Clyde remark in particular had been a good one. It sounded like something Myth would have said. Maybe he was rubbing off on me. Though I never would have said this to his face, I could think of few better people to be influenced by.

  This year’s Hero Trials were scheduled to begin in a little over six months, and its application deadline was rapidly approaching. Though the Old Man hadn’t yet said he would certify us Apprentices to apply to stand for the Trials, we hoped he would. The way I felt right now, I just knew the Trials would be a walk in the park. I’d have my Hero’s license and be a full-fledged Hero in no time.

  I felt twenty feet tall and covered in hair. There was nobody’s butt I couldn’t kick. I felt like I could single-handedly take on the Sentinels, the world’s pre-eminent Hero team. To make it a fair fight, I’d even give them the first punch.

  Then, something that had been nagging at the edge of my conscious mind pierced my cockiness. My hoodie felt slightly heavier than it should. As I continued flying, I reached into its left pocket. Something was inside. I pulled it out. I looked at a round, metal, brass-colored ball that was about half the size of a cue ball and a lot lighter.

  Where in the world did this come from? I thought. I brought the ball up to my face to look at it more closely. I had never seen it before, nor did I know what it was.

  Then I thought of how the blonde girl in the bank had so aggressively put her hands all over me.

  Right as I thought that, the ball flashed, turning an incandescent white.

  It exploded in my face.