Superpowers 1: Superguy Read online

  SUPERGUY

  Book One of the Superpowers Series

  T. Jackson King

  Other King Novels

  Battlecry (forthcoming), Battlegroup (2016), Battlestar (2016), Defeat The Aliens (2016), Fight The Aliens (2016), First Contact (2015), Escape From Aliens (2015), Aliens Vs. Humans (2015), Freedom Vs. Aliens (2015), Humans Vs. Aliens (2015), Earth Vs. Aliens (2014), Genecode Illegal (2014), The Memory Singer (2014), Alien Assassin (2014), Anarchate Vigilante (2014), Galactic Vigilante (2013), Nebula Vigilante (2013), Speaker To Aliens (2013), Galactic Avatar (2013), Stellar Assassin (2013), Retread Shop (2012, 1988), Star Vigilante (2012), The Gaean Enchantment (2012), Little Brother’s World (2010), Judgment Day And Other Dreams (2009), Ancestor’s World (1996).

  Dedication

  To my wife Sue, my son Keith and my dad Thomas, thank you all for your active duty service in defense of America.

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks go to the scientists and researchers of Los Alamos National Laboratory who work tirelessly to keep America safe and to maintain our weapons superiority. Second thanks go to several retired LANL researchers who shared their experiences with me. Third thanks to Unitarians in Los Alamos and Santa Fe who welcomed me.

  SUPERGUY

  © 2016 T. Jackson King

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

  Cover design by T. Jackson King; cover by Nomadsoul1 and back page image by Sanchas1980 via Dreamstime.com license.

  First Edition

  Published by T. Jackson King, Santa Fe, NM 87507

  http://www.tjacksonking.com/

  ISBN 10: 1-53974-704-2

  ISBN 13: 978-1-53974-704-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Superpowers are overrated. I’m not invulnerable. Bullets and lasers can hurt me. I can’t fly like a jet. I can’t bend a steel rod, unless it’s soft pig iron. But I can ‘jump’ or teleport to anyplace I want to be. However, it has to be a place I’ve visited. And I can move stuff from one place to another like a leaf moving on the wind. The books call that levitation. Big deal. Mind reading is a pain, something I’ve done my best to block. It hurts actually. My eyes are normal, not heat ray powered. Though I can see really good in the dark thanks to the warmth from living bodies. My hearing is mostly normal, but I can hear a bird chirping from a mile away. Maybe that’s special. I like breathing, so I can’t live in outer space. And I have no friends, family or anyone but me.

  Once, when I was four, I saw the clouds in the sky. Something inside me wanted to touch a cloud. Before I knew it, there I was up close to the bottom of a puffy white cloud. I touched it, then realized I was falling. It was a long way down. Somehow I ended up back in our basement playroom. The place with books and toys where I usually felt safe from everyone else. Even my parents. After that, I learned to be very careful about feeling impulses. I could have died when I was just four.

  At five I caused a fire in my Mom’s kitchen. I’d seen the stove’s gas burners and thought it would be fun to make fire happen in the sink. I was alone then, while my Mom was out hanging clothes on a line in the backyard. The yellow flame scared me. Before I knew it, the water knob had turned on and water fell from the faucet onto the globe of flame, putting it out. Years later I learned that was called pyrokinesis, or causing fire at a distance. Turning on the water knob without touching it was called psychokinesis or telekinesis. I admit to having fun mind-tossing rocks at the squirrels in a nearby tree.

  First grade was when I learned other kids could not do what I could. Reading the answers to a simple math question by reading the numbers in my teacher’s mind was easy. Then I learned adults were suspicious of what they could not explain. She thought I’d looked at her answer book in her desk. She insisted I use pencil and paper to show her how to do a simple multiple addition. I couldn’t. That gave me my first experience of being punished for being different.

  Being different was bad. That’s what first grade taught me. But when I first heard the story of Jesus walking on water during a reading of Mark’s gospel at the local Unitarian church attended by my parents and me, it made me wonder if Jesus had been like me. Born with strange abilities.

  Running faster than other kids, jumping farther and being the first to catch a soccer ball made me unpopular with the other kids at Aspen Elementary. I didn’t know I was ‘jumping’ myself through the air in order to win the race or catch the ball. Other kids and the grownups said I ran like a blur. Later on in junior high, when I ran in races, I learned how the human mind creates an ‘explanation’ for things people see that they do not understand. Made me glad there were no cameras or smartphones in the play yard. But being unpopular taught me the simplest lesson of my life so far—only behave the way I see other people behaving. That included making good grades and being smart, which the Los Alamos school system focused on a lot, due to so many parents being scientists who worked at the nearby national lab. Being smart and getting good grades were easy for me. What was hard was making friends. I always felt like an outsider, due to the abilities I had to keep secret. It didn’t feel good hiding away a part of myself that I thought was pretty nifty.

  My sophomore year on the JV track and field team of Los Alamos High School was normal, not unusual. I made the relay team. We did good in regional meets. But I made sure not to look too different. Even though I’d learned by then how to run faster than a car by levitating myself ahead in short ‘jumps’. But I couldn’t do that in public. Too many smartphones at every field practice. Nor could I do teleportation, like jumping instantly to my favorite camping spot close to Jemez Falls on the East Fork of the Jemez River, northwest of Los Alamos. It’s not good to suddenly disappear in front of people. Though I do admit to walking on the water of the nearby river when I first visited the small meadow spot that was my earliest place to escape to when life got too crazy.

  My only girlfriend in high school left me when I shocked her while making love in her parents’ home. We were both naked on her bed, having a good time. When I came hard inside her, the pleasure peak overcame all thought. Before I knew it we were both in the dark basement of my parents’ home, with Mercedes underneath me, her bare back on the cold concrete floor. She yelled. I instantly teleported us back to her bedroom, which was brightly lighted. My effort to explain the sudden darkness and coldness as her orgasm peak just made her look weirdly at me. She shoved me out of her house and I never saw a friendly look from her again.

  My Mom knew I was different by the start of first grade. She’d caught me levitating dirty dishes from the dinner table into the kitchen. She sat me down, asked about how I did stuff and mostly I told her what I could do that other kids could not. She frowned, then gave me a happy smile as she said the words “You’re just a superguy, Jeffrey! But don’t tell anyone else what you’ve told me, or let other people see you do stuff. They won’t understand.” During elementar
y school, she guided me in how to appear ‘normal’ to other people. But every night she gave me a hug in my bed, kissed me goodnight, and then left to be with my Dad. I loved her a lot.

  I lost my Mom late in my senior year at LAHS. That left me with my physicist Dad, who pushed me to attend the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I went four years there, living in a campus dorm, doing nothing unusual and earned a degree in information technology. He attended my graduation and gave me one of his rare smiles. It was the last time I saw him smile. Or be alive. On the drive home up Interstate 25, a drunk driver crossed over and hit our car head on. I ended up at the roadside, watching both cars burn in a flaming pile of wreckage, feeling guilty I had not teleported my Dad out with me. But I’d learned by then that I could only teleport other people by touching them or holding them.

  The crash happened so fast that my instinct moved me out of the car faster than I could think to grab my Dad. He died there. The state police said I must have been thrown free, through the open window to the right of my Dad. They didn’t know I’d been seated in the back seat, reading a novel on my kindle. I didn’t tell them otherwise.

  The wreck left me totally alone. I had no aunts or uncles, and my grandparents were all long gone. So I moved to Santa Fe and got a job working at the REI outdoors supplies store in the Railyard section of town, next to the railroad track. It fit with my camping out times and my love of the outdoors.

  Now, I work five days a week, pretend an interest in baseball scores and football teams, drink a few beers with my coworkers on Friday night, and laugh at their stories of weird customers. I fit in.

  But I feel so alone. So lonely. Why am I the way I am? What kind of life can I ever have? And will any woman ever love me for who I really am?

  I don’t know. I just know that having superpowers does not mean I will suddenly teleport to Paris, use mind powers to make terrorists lose their guns, then port them into the Seine River. Maybe I could do that. But then people would see me, cameras would record me and suddenly some dark federal agency would grab me and take me some place to be studied like a lab rat.

  So I work at REI, guiding customers to the camping and hiking gear they need to roam the nearby mountains, pretending to be happy at their visit, and then guiding them to the checkout counter at one side of the store. Only fun I ever had there was one weekend when a fifty percent off sale was set and advertised. Suddenly, just minutes after the front glass doors were opened, the store lost all power. Minutes later we learned that all the stores in the Railyard had lost power. So the store shut down, customers outside made faces and I bicycled home, smiling because corporate policy required that I be given a full day’s pay for showing up.

  Sometimes, at night just before I go to sleep, I fantasize. I think about teleporting into the vault of my local Wells Fargo bank, opening the locked trays with a crowbar, grabbing cash and jewelry and putting it all in my backpack, then teleporting back to my apartment. Or maybe out to my campsite in the Jemez Falls area until the local newspaper stops running stories about the secret robber of a local bank. Other times I imagine I’m in my Dad’s car and not reading. I see the drunk driver’s car running over the median and heading for us. I reach up, grab my Dad’s shoulder and teleport us both out of the car and to the grassy hillside where I ended up in real life.

  Life. I live, Dad doesn’t, nor does my Mom. Why? Why am I the way I am? Am I a mutant, a genetic shuffle of the deck that became me? Or did my Mom and Dad’s exposure to radioactive waste while hiking a nearby Los Alamos canyon affect them and cause them to have a son like me? Don’t know that either. Just know that my Mom, years later, told me about those hikes they took when they first worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She said they had been caught by lab security while hiking in what was called Area G. They got washed down, decontaminated, their clothing taken from them and written reprimands were entered into their lab files. But they never got sick and pretty soon no one at the lab brought up their escapade.

  Time to stop writing. My depression counselor told me to begin writing a journal about my life and my experiences with my parents. I’m doing that. But writing doesn’t change anything. Why should I live when my parents don’t? What use am I to anyone else when I’m afraid to be my real self? Or is there a chance I can put my superpowers to good use? To help people the way my Mom hoped would happen.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Special Agent Janet Van Groot sat back from her computer screen, lifted her arms high and stretched. No one looked her way or said a thing. Her work station cubbyhole on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown D.C. was not a desirable location, unlike the deputy director level offices with private outside porches. Two months earlier, fresh from training at Quantico, she had been assigned to the intelligence unit, Counterintelligence Division of the National Security Branch of the FBI, and given the dumb job of monitoring the adult children of nerds who worked at the national laboratories. Places like Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Argonne, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratory. At the time, she’d asked her boss, a Mormon elder who hailed from Provo, what was the point? It was the adults now or recently working at the labs who posed a risk of selling nuke or cyber secrets to the Chinese, Russians or Iran. Not their kids.

  The six foot six man, who always wore a black Brooks Brothers suit, blue tie and antique spectacles rather than contacts, had peered at her across their table in the eighth floor cafeteria and given her a patient look.

  “Miz Van Groot, you are new here. Perhaps someday you will advance to work in our sister section, the Intelligence Branch.” His patronizing tone had made her clench her fists on her lap, below the table rim. The bald-headed bastard had no reason to act so superior. “You are assigned the social media, public behavior and private behavior monitoring of the adult children of current or former lab workers exactly because they may have observed some parental behavior that involved contact with a foreign agent. People your age are used to chatting loosely on social media places like Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and the like.” His frown betrayed his opinion of those normal chit-chat venues. “Yes, there are thousands of such adult offspring. Yes, the work is tedious. But so is the collection of fingerprints from bomb blast sites. Our analysts review many prints in order to find the vital print or prints. Just as our video analysts review mediocre images from building security cameras.” He gave her a smile that barely moved his clean-shaven face. “Your assignment is the kind of background detective work that might reveal a foreign agent before the branch’s executive assistant director gets a call from the bureau’s associate deputy director, demanding to know why we didn’t prevent the latest bombing or theft of a weapons design. Understand?”

  “Yes sir, I understand,” she had replied, holding back on her opinion of the man. It was clear this fossil did not like women in special agent positions, let alone a woman who had completed a thesis on industrial espionage. “May I seek assistance from other members of our branch, the bureau’s other branches, maybe even the National Counterintelligence and Security Center?”

  The man had grimaced. “Judgment, young lady! Learn some judgment. A new special agent does not go roaming into the inner workings of other national security agencies without explicit proof of a national security violation.” Joshua Lederberg picked up his glass of lemonade, took a sip and looked sharply at her. “Of course you may request assistance from anyone within our branch. Contact with parties outside the branch, but within the agency, happens only with my permission. Contact with outside agencies like the NSA, DIA or NCSC is only done with the approval of Executive Assistant Director Michael Wambach of the NSB.”

  She nodded quickly. “Certainly sir! I do understand our chain of command.” The man put down his lemonade, looking thoughtful. “Will there be a chance for a field visit to any of the labs I am monitoring? At the academy I trained under the special agent who led the team that arrested Liew and Maegerle. He taught me the value of being in the field so tha
t—”

  “You are here solely because of that training by Special Agent McPherson,” Lederberg interrupted. “And also thanks to your thesis on industrial espionage and ways to detect it. Field assignments are given out on the basis of the agency’s needs. As you know, there are two operations units within our division. If one of them requests your assistance, I might consider loaning you out. Depending on the progress you make in reviewing the lab offspring files.” He looked at his iWatch. “Lunch is over. Should you not head back to work on those files?”

  “Of course, sir,” Janet had said, standing up. “Thank you for your counsel. I will apply myself diligently to reviewing the databases on laboratory adult children.”

  “See that you do.” The man stood up, turned away and then headed for another bald-headed man whom he hailed with a casual “Joe!”

  That had been two months ago. Now, sitting in front of her large screen computer, where the Classified PDF file of all laboratory offspring held page after page of names, ages, locations and photos, she told herself the job she was doing was indeed important. In 1995 or earlier, China had stolen the design for the W-88 thermonuclear warhead, a design created in Los Alamos. The prime suspect in the theft was Wen Ho Lee, a computer scientist working on nuclear weapons designs. His Chinese wife had been invited to a high level computer conference in China, which he attended with her. He was later indicted by the Justice Department and pled guilty to mishandling Classified data. The man then sued Justice and received a $1.9 million settlement for the leaking of his name to the news media. But Janet knew there was more to Chinese spying at Los Alamos. The Lee case and the later bureau arrests and prosecutions of Chi Mak and Greg Chung were the reason she was now reviewing the social media history of Gloria Chén. She was the grown daughter of Hui and Jiang Chén, two current Los Alamos National Lab employees. Gloria was the 297th name on Janet’s list, in alphabetical order.