Superlucky Part Two

Speedsters are subject to the same barriers as everyone else.

    Rick chanced a glance around the dumpster just in time to see a lime-green blur go by. He wiped away some spittle from the side of his mouth. The Speedster was running in a search pattern, but only through the streets and alleys. Rick needed to get into a building. He started trying all the doors in the alley. Finally, one opened and he disappeared inside.
    It was the fluorescent-lit workshop of a cake decorator. Stainless steel pots hung from the walls and a tower of cake pans had been stacked by the industrial sink. He didn't see anyone, but the cake decorated to be Noah’s Arc was not finished, as one giraffe sat on the starboard deck while the other stood lonely on the flour-dusted countertop. Rick debated with himself. A cake decorator would most likely be a normie, but there was the occasional super who preferred an artisan occupation. A normie would hide him, a super would definitely turn him in. Rick snapped out of it-- he couldn't take any chances.

    Rick lost no time in going through the flapping door. He appeared by the front desk, to the great surprise of a pale high school intern.
    Rick never stopped moving toward the front door. “Don’t worry. I came in the back, but I’ll just leave through the front. The Noah’s Arc is looking fine!” He exited into a main hall.
    Lined to his left and right were offices and other small businesses. A security camera, like a nonchalant cat, watched his movements. He couldn’t stay here, either.
    He ran to the glass front door, which promised a secluded side street beyond its hinge.  On the brick wall across the way he could make out a giant advertisement for a musical about a bum who wins the lottery. Rick flung open the door. There was a shattering crash and a large mass knocked the wind out him. Covered in shards of glass and a lime-green body, Rick realized he had opened the door just as the Speedster was running by. He deteriorated into hysterics once his breath came back.
    Rick rolled the knocked out Speedster off of himself and gingerly stood up. The glass had imbedded itself everywhere. He beheld his red speckled hands for a moment. His tongue tasted blood in his mouth. He tried to set into a jog, but at the first step his knee buckled and he fell. Rick lifted his pant leg. There was a shard a quarter inch deep in his kneecap, and red leaked from it like a broken tap. The blood drained from his face. There was no running away. Rick let himself collapse onto the ground, his eyes misting over from tears of pain and defeat.
    His chest heaved. “Cara...,” he croaked. This mess was all his fault.

#

    Rick drummed his fingers against the logo for the green tea raspberry Icee. “Hey, this has caffeine. Would you like this one?”
    Cara’s lipsticked eyebrows came together in uncertainty and she looked around nervously. “Just get me a little of everything.”
    Rick cackled, “With pleasure.”
    He grabbed a 32 ounce cup and began filling it with the colors of the rainbow, elated at his small victory of waltzing into the Short Stop with Cara. Sure, people sneaked in sidelong glances, but Rick could see that no one thought that she was anything other than a girl with costume makeup smeared all over her face. The people who would know wouldn't shop at this particular store.
    Rick had wanted to test how well the disguise worked among the general super public. The Short Stop was located well outside of any normie neighborhood, and it was a normie community that knew and readily hid Cara. Though she was a fugitive, it was not hard for them to welcome her: she could single handedly strip the supers of their talents and she had no power over the talentless. No, the disguise was not to hide her from normies, but from the supers who knew and dreaded her tattoo.
    Having finished filling the cup, Rick turned to hand it to Cara, but instead it collided into a another customer walking by. “Damn!”
    The customer, bellowed his reply, “‘Damn’? You bump into me, ruin my shirt, and all you can say is ‘damn’?!”
    He then hoisted Rick by his collar. Rick’s gaze followed up the arms, which were enveloped in a high end sports jacket, up to a stout neck and then a perfectly groomed beard. The man’s eyes were uncomfortably dark, offsetting the sparkling studs in his ears. The rainbow Icee Rick had taken such care in preparing had mixed into a dark purple when it hit the man’s baby blue button-up.
    “Well, yeah. I lost my drink. But I am sorry about your shirt, man,” Rick responded in a non-submissive manner.
    The man’s lip quivered into a snarl, his anger not placated. “Where’s your tattoo?” he demanded.
    Rick tried to shrug, but couldn't in his hoisted position. “I don’t have one.”
    The man smiled and relinquished one hand from Rick’s collar. Before he curled it into a fist, Rick saw on the palm a tattoo of a power symbol, of a circle broken by a protruding line. The man held his fist up to Rick's face and it began to glow yellow. “You see this? This is power. I have it and you don’t. You bumped into me, so I better start hearing a lot more than ‘sorry about your shirt, man.’”
    Rick's stomach knotted itself in dread. He was not worried about any physical pain the super could do it to him, it was that Cara was a mere three feet away, watching the whole thing. He wanted to call out to her to tell her to stay out of it, but was afraid that to do so would make the super pick on her as well. But if he didn't, then Cara would probably...
    “What the-?!” the man exclaimed as the light around his hand died. He shook his fist as if a fuse were loose.
    Rick peeled his collar out from the man’s remaining hand. He grabbed Cara’s arm and rushed toward the door. He whispered harshly in her ear, “You have to give it back. Now!”
    I can't, her lips had mouthed. She and Rick turned their heads to catch sight of the man turning red from the effort of trying to make his talent work again. Every muscle in his body was clenched, as if he could force it out. Rick knew Cara had been living hidden among normies for too long, she probably couldn’t remember what it felt like to disable others, what it felt like to re-enable them. After he had lead her through the sliding doors, he pulled them both into a run.
    Between huffs of breath, Cara had tried to explain herself. "I'm sorry! I just hated what I saw, wanted it to stop, to snuff it out like a candle, suffocate it, anything to keep it from being used on you."
    "I'm sorry, too," he huffed back to her. "This is all my fault."
    When they were fifty yards away, there was an explosion, bright and yellow as the sun. Fifty yards was the radius of Cara’s talent.

    Who persuades the Persuader?

    Rick didn’t know how much time had passed. The peeling, enormous face of the lucky bum still laughed just as heartily from his brick wall as he did the last time Rick glanced at him. He reached down and finally pulled the shard from his knee. The pain saturated his exhalations with a rattle.
    A monotone voice drifted through Rick’s sobs. “You made quick work of Barry. I’m not sure how to feel about that. I like Barry. He makes me laugh sometimes.”
    The voice belonged to a petite, half-Asian woman in an oversized black trench coat. The shadows under almond shaped eyes were like charcoal against snow, giving her an otherworldly, sickly appearance. In her hand was the device she had used to track the Speedster when it became known that he had stopped moving. Despite her words of affection for him, and despite the broken normie before her, she had a manner of utter indifference.
    She rolled Rick out of his fetal position and onto his back. “Mr. Baldric Felix Chodzko?” She obviously already knew the answer.
    Rick grimaced in response.
    The woman pulled something from her pocket. “Mr. Chodzko, you are suspected of an act of terrorism. In my hand is the warrant for you to be made subject to a Persuader. Do you understand me?”
    Rick bit his already bloody lip.
    “Then we will proceed.” She extended her hand toward Rick’s temple.
    Rick wanted to run away. He wanted to hop up onto his good knee and book it, but he couldn’t. It was all over. He knew what the insignia was supposed to look like, but his mind had lapsed when he actually saw it. It was the bags under her eyes, they were inked in. It was meant to give her a monstrous appearance, to make the poor soul in front of her give up everything before she had to use her talent. Her apathetic tone, her complexion, her ghastly tattoo...Rick trembled.
    Her hand finally made contact with Rick’s skull, launching his consciousness on a tour of pain. It started with memories that were embedded in him like the shards of glass. The Persuader prodded at the ones that were skewered in the vicinity of his heart: the divorce of his parents, the death of his dog, his first heartbreak. Then she moved outward: humiliation at school, being bullied by supers. This was all compacted into a few seconds. Then she moved onto his memories of physical pain, memories that forced Rick to relive them: his broken arm skateboarding, the orthodontist tightening his braces, his drunken friend punching him in the face, a shattered collarbone after angering a super.
    The Persuader drew her hand away, but Rick’s nervous system was still being overloaded with signals of injury. He writhed in pain. She waited until his breathing came down from its level of hyperventilation.
    “I have what I need to continue, Mr. Chodzko. You should be warned that what I do next will entail making you experience things that you haven’t before. I will make you see, hear, and feel what I want you to, unless you give me cause not to proceed.”
    “Look at you,” he cried. “You destroy a guy without flinching! How can you be so complacent about what they make you do? At what they’re doing to you?”
    The Persuader was unaffected. “It’s my job, and innocent men don’t resist. They don’t run away.” She put forth her ghostly fingers once more.
    Rick clenched in anticipation, but when her clammy touch made contact, nothing happened. He let go of the breath he had been holding. There was a flash of confusion on the Persuader’s brow. She stood and looked around.
    “You can face me, now. You know I’m powerless,” she calmly shared with the night.
    A hooded figure came from around a corner. She lifted the hood away from her zebra-lined face. Cara dared the Persuader in a low voice, “I’m taking him with me.”
    The Persuader didn’t even glance at Rick as she talked about him. “I can’t let you, unless you prove he’s not a terrorist.”
    Cara did look at Rick, who was still lay limply on the ground. “I caused the explosion. I used my talent against an unsuspecting super who was going to hurt Rick. His talent was gathering energy. He had tried so hard to regain it, that when his talent finally came back to him, he wasn’t prepared for the onslaught. He was the bomb.”
    The Persuader considered her. With no change of expression or gesture, she turned around and proceeded to walk away.
    “That’s it?!” Rick called after her in disbelief.
    The Persuader paused her step, but did not turn around as she answered him. “My job was to find out if Mr. Chodzko was a terrorist. He’s not. I do not have orders or a warrant to bring in an escaped Klepto.” She continued toward the police station.
    Cara ran to help Rick up onto his good leg. “Baldric, that was so lucky! My God, I always thought it was joke, but you are super lucky.” She draped his arm across her shoulders.
    Rick embraced her, ignoring the bits of glass digging deeper into his skin. “Yeah, I’m super lucky to have you.”