Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (19 page)

“But-” Michael said.

“Don't you 'but' me, sonny jim. You still
haven't apologized to your grandfather. I don't know where you got
this idea that everyone is out to get you. We have your best
interests at heart, you know. When children grow up, they learn
that they can't always have what they want. And maybe it's time
that you learned that hitting someone is not a good way to get what
you want. If you wanted those notes, and you wanted to see your
friend, you should have thought of that before you jumped on your
grandfather.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, I think your
mother is right,” Grandpa said at last.

They were talking about each other in the
third person again.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You need some time to think about our
reasons. If you want to ask me about them, I will be happy to
explain everything to you, sometime in the next month.”

“When is she getting out of prison?”

“Oh Michael,” his mother moaned.

“It is not a prison, kiddo. Point of fact,
it's a training facility. If we thought Charlotte's Activation was
a real danger, there is another facility farther from here, but we
don't think she's a big threat to herself or others. She gets three
meals a day, study time with tutors, all the music she wants. It's
more like a vacation away from school than a prison.”

“Oh,” he said. It didn't sound that bad, when
you put it like that. What he'd read in the note said she wasn't
really in danger, but she couldn't leave.

“So next time, you may want to use your head
instead of your fists. Maybe if you had, you'd be on your way to
talk to her right now.”

Those words, especially out of his mother’s
mouth, steadily made their way into his guts, where they made him
feel like a complete jerk over and over again until he just wanted
to shrink into his seat, maybe squeeze into the space between the
seat and the back, pop right out into the trunk of the SUV. There
was a red mark on the side of Grandpa's face, but he wasn't paying
any attention to it.

They finished their meal in silence and drove
home in the December cold. Outside snow had started its lazy drift,
piling up on the grass and a bit on the trees. Charlotte wouldn't
be able to play in it, but neither would he, without some seriously
good behavior. Oh, who was he kidding? The snow would probably be
melted and March would be inching toward its miserable, gray end by
the time he got on his mom's good side.

And his mother wasn't going to make it easy
either. She sent him straight off to bed when they got back home.
For a while he listened to the sound of a low, intense, muffled
conversation just outside his door, but he couldn't make out the
words. He decided, after maybe ten minutes, that he wanted to know
what they were talking about. He crept to his door and tried the
knob. He knew that if he made even the slightest click, his mother
would be down his throat and he would be grounded until he was
eighteen.

He felt the catch slide, slowly, slowly,
until finally it was free. Then he eased the door open a fraction
of an inch and peered down the stairs.

His mother was standing with her back to him
and her arms crossed. Grandpa must have been on the sofa, or maybe
the easy chair. If his dad was a superhero, why didn't they have a
bigger house? Why didn't his dad drive a Ferrari? Why didn't he
have the best bike in the universe, if his dad was Stone and he was
making money off his action figure sales? It wasn't fair.

He lay down on the floor and pressed his ear
to the two inch gap.

“...you knew what you were getting into. You
knew the risks,” Grandpa was saying.

“You think I don't know that?” his mother
said. “And now that he knows? What now?”

“Oh, he doesn't know everything, not by a
long shot,” Grandpa said.

“The Alphas.”

“The Alphas, the Betas, Deltas, he'll find
out all of that at Marcus Patterson. By high school all of this
will be a little memory. We'll have a drink and tell ourselves we
dodged a bullet.”

“He's got to make it to high school first,”
his mother warned. “What are you doing about that? Because I have
to tell you, I don't like it. Four of them off schedule? When's the
last one you had off schedule?”

“We're working on it, Susanna.”

“You've been working on it since that
Millickie kid. And what happens if his little friend Davey goes
Active and he decides that my son needs to pay for humiliating him?
What do you think is going to happen then?”

“Susanna, we're doing the best we can. We
can't watch every child in the school and figure out the problem at
the same time.”

“Is it the Omega Syndicate?” she asked.

“Would you keep your voice down?” Grandpa
hissed. His mother's head whipped around and stared hard at
Michael's door. He'd just had time to move his head. He wasn't sure
if his ear would be visible when she looked, but he didn't want to
take the chance.

Omega Syndicate.
Just what was
that?

“It's time I was going,” Grandpa said.

“I'll drive you.”

“Nonsense. It's only three blocks. You take
care of my grandson. I won't discourage curiosity, but I can't have
him poking his nose where it doesn't belong. I liked it better when
he had it buried in that reader thing of his all day long. Not a
care in the world. Heh, what I wouldn't give.”

“Tell me Harold, is it the Omegas?”

A loud sigh. “We don't know. We've suspected
they have someone here for a while. This might be what they want,
it might just be a streak of bad luck. We just don't know.”

He got up. Grandpa getting up was a loud and
slow process.

“If it is, what are we going to do?”

“The same thing we did last time, I guess,”
Grandpa replied. “Hide in bomb shelters and come out when the smoke
clears.”

His mother laughed, but that laughter had a
high, strange edge to it. It was the crazy laugh that girl had when
she was tearing apart the school, looking at Davey. It was the type
of laugh you made when everything was going all wrong.

If Michael thought he was done feeling like a
criminal for hitting Grandpa, he was dead wrong. The next day, when
he got home from school, his mother was holding the tablet and
talking to...his father.

“Here he is,” his mother said. She turned the
tablet around, and the angriest face he had ever seen swung into
view. Michael's stomach turned to ice and dropped straight into the
seat of his pants. He was sure he was going to pee himself.

“Oh,” he said.

“Oh?” his father said. “Is that what you have
to say for yourself?”

“I'm sorry?” he tried. Wow, check out that
super interesting carpet. The number of times Michael found himself
staring at the carpet in embarrassment, you'd think he could work
at a flooring company.

“Sorry doesn't cut it, buster. Do you know
how close I am to letting this war in Bangladesh continue just so I
can come home and beat your butt raw? I'll get Bob and Mr. L so I
don't have to hold back either. You can heal up again every time it
gets bad enough. I swear to the almighty God you will never know
such pain in your life, boy. Then I'll think about whether we'll
just take your head off and clone you.”

“Only figure out how we went wrong,” his
mother asked.

“Probably we didn't spank him enough.”

“But dad-” he said. He was going to tell him
how Grandpa had lied to him. Lying was the worst thing you could do
in the Washington household (though apparently hitting your
grandfather was the new number one), a crime punishable by
death.

“Don't you dare,” Michael Sr. snarled.
“You're going to learn how to be a big boy and not settle all your
problems with your fists, or so help me, you are not going to have
any hands left to punch with. Am I clear?”

He couldn't make his throat work.

“I said am I clear.”

Tears ran down his cheeks, hot and silent. He
nodded, and hoped it was enough. He didn't have any friends at
school, he didn't have Charlotte, now he couldn't even talk to
Grandpa because he was a liar. Now, literally, he had nothing.

“You mind your mother,” he said. “And if I
hear you've set a toe out of line, I'm coming back personally to
fly you up into the stratosphere. You'll have a couple minutes to
think about what you've done before you black out or land,
whichever happens first. I am a busy man. If your mother has to
call this number again, you're done.”

He zipped away from the tablet and into a
hail of mortar rounds exploding the dirt all around where he ran.
Michael had time enough to see him jump onto a tank, turn into
plated steel, and tear off the gun turret before the call
ended.

Michael ran up the stairs to his room, jumped
on the bed, and tore the covers off like they were a gun turret,
and buried himself in them to cry.

The only things that were consistently true
over and again were a) the adults were lying to him, and b) the
adults didn't trust him enough to tell him what they knew, which
was more or less the same as lying. He thought, hard, about running
away. He had money stashed in a little box under his mother's bed.
He knew that he had nearly a thousand dollars saved up, now that
Trent was out of the picture.

He wasn't sticking around this place because
he was scared; he'd faced down scary and busted its nose, twice,
and then faced down something even scarier and won. He wasn't even
afraid (not completely) of running across smoking craters where big
US cities used to be. And he definitely was not at all afraid of
coming across Actives.

What stopped him were the notes he hadn't
gotten from Charlotte. There were two that he knew of. Okay, one
and a half if he wanted to get technical about it, and even though
the evidence suggested she wasn't in danger, he wanted to help her
however he could.

There were also a hundred or so Active people
in this little gem of a town who could probably track him down, or
keep him from leaving. He wasn't concerned with them. His father
was Stone and his grandfather was some sort of superhero mafia don.
They wouldn't mess with Michael Washington Junior.

Right, another part of him argued, just like
they didn't mess with you at the assembly.

The second part was that life got back to
normal really quick. His mother seemed to be normal enough, serving
him up chopped apple bites and cereal for breakfast, packing his
lunch, and reminding him to lock the garage door like she always
did. Before he left, though, she reminded him that he needed to be
back home directly after school.

“Yes mother,” he said, in what he hoped was
his most respectful disrespectful tone he could manage.

The anger came though, and when it arrived,
it came on strong. Just who did they think they were, keeping
things from him? Did they think he was some sort of little baby?
Maybe they did. They thought he couldn't handle the truth about his
father, they thought the same thing about his grandfather. As if he
wouldn't think it was really cool to have a dad flying all over the
world stopping bad guys.

Unless he wasn't stopping bad guys.

Whatever, he thought. It didn't matter much
who his dad was fighting, since they were just lying and lying and
lying. First about his dad, then Grandpa from the moment he was
born, but lord knew what else they were keeping from him.

Christmas came and went. It was probably the
worst one ever, since he learned that his father was searching
through tunnels in the former Peoples' Democratic Republic of Korea
for separatists. So he wasn't home, and he didn't get much for
Christmas anyway, since his mother was still really mad at him. He
was grounded. No place to go except out in the bitter cold to
deliver papers to houses that didn't really need them to begin
with. The whole paper route system was probably cooked up by his
grandfather, who thought everybody wanted to reminisce about the
old times by reading paper instead of an eye-strain-free paper
substitute that wasn't a drain on the environment and didn't
require hundreds of trees to die every day. He got a ridiculously
long hat that was for downhill sledding, which he didn't do because
he didn't have friends to sled with. The first week after
Christmas, it got caught in his bike chain and stained with axle
grease. His mother was not best pleased.

Maybe two weeks after Christmas break, he
began to see Charlotte everywhere. When mom gave up and took him
out for some post-Christmas bargain shopping (she couldn't just
leave him at home, what with the danger of him going Active and
burning the house down), he thought he saw her shopping for
blouses. When he broke away from his mom, running, he didn't find
anybody there.

She was an Active. She could turn invisible
or something. Teleport away maybe.

He caught a glimpse of her later as they
pulled up to one of the city's few red lights. Charlotte was having
an animated conversation...with someone else's family. It wasn't
her family, for sure. Instead of Mrs. Sulzsko, it was a strange man
driving, and in the back seat were two other girls in ballet
outfits, complete with sparkling tiaras.

Michael didn't want to sit bolt upright in
his seat and cry out, he regretted it as soon as he did it, but it
was something of a reflex. He couldn't have stopped it any more
than he could stop a train with his bare hands.

“What was that all about?” his mother
asked.

“Nothing,” he said immediately, but she could
sniff out a lie at fifty feet. Actually he wondered if she could
tell when the neighbors were lying to each other across the
street.

“Michael Edward,” she warned.

The sigh he pulled up was a deep one. “I
thought I saw Charlotte.”

“But it wasn't Charlotte.”