Diary of a Teenage Superhero

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first thing we see is a big empty semi-circular room. A desk is set back about twenty feet from the elevator. Beige carpet covers the floor. Behind the desk there’s an empty chair and partition walls. The words Stanley Imports are positioned at eye level in an italicized font. No one is in sight.

  The only other object I can see is a pot plant to the right of the elevator doors.

  Brodie and Dan step out of the elevator and stride straight into the heart of the lobby. Instead of following them, I place myself between the two doors to stop them from closing. While the sensors register a blockage, the doors will not close.

  I hope.

  My stomach is bouncing around like it’s full of jello. There’s something bad here. I can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t make sense. It’s something about the furniture…

  Brodie stops in the middle of the lobby. She looks around for a door. Dan strides straight to the desk. He looks like he’s ready to pick up pieces of furniture with his mind and start hurling them around.

  The elevator doors want to close. The door behind me jars against my back and then slides back into the recess. Brodie turns at the sound and looks curiously at me. Then her eyes shift as she surveys the semi-circular chamber again. Her eyes narrow. Her mouth settles into a frown.

  “Where are these turkeys?” Dan asks. “They’re afraid to take us on.”

  He turns around and for the first time looks a little unsure of himself. It’s hard to show bravado when there’s no one to display it to. The door of the elevator tries to close again. There’s probably someone on the fiftieth floor looking at their watch and wondering who’s holding up the elevator.

  Let them wait.

  “There’s something wrong here,” I tell them.

  Brodie looks at me worriedly. “I think you’re right.”

  Leaning out into the foyer, I’m just about to tell them to get back into the elevator when I catch movement in two directions at once. Two slots open up in opposing walls. A machine gun appears in both.

  Dan looks confused. Brodie takes a single step in the direction of the elevator.

  The guns open fire.

  One second there is silence. The next there is an explosion of sound that makes your eardrums hurt. I throw my arms out, screaming, but my words are drowned by the explosion of the guns. Both Brodie and Dan are caught between the two weapons. They throw themselves to the ground, but I immediately see bullets slamming into carpet, ricocheting off the ceiling, cutting the desk to pieces, slamming into the opposing walls.

  It should be a bloodbath, but somehow they start crawling to the elevator. A bullet ricochets past my ear and smashes the mirror at the back of the elevator. Pieces of carpet are flying into the air. Plaster is reduced to dust. There’s so much debris flying around it’s almost impossible to see the far wall.

  Brodie gets to the elevator first. She reaches back for Dan and drags him in after her. Only then does my focus turn away from the arena of destruction taking place outside the doors. I slam the button for the ground floor. Even as I do, I wonder if Ravana and his men have some special control over the elevator that will stop it from moving.

  If they do, it’s game over.

  It seems to take an eternity, but to my enormous relief the doors slide shut and the sound of gunfire dulls to silence. After another unbearably long second, the elevator starts to descend.

  Brodie looks up at me. Her face is stricken with disbelief.

  She tries to speak. “It was…it was…”

  “A trap,” I say.

  Dan is lying on the floor in fetal position. Shaking. I kneel next to him and search for blood. I don’t find any.

  “Dan?” He’s looking straight at my knee. There’s drool around his mouth. “Dan? Can you hear me?”

  “He’s in shock,” Brodie says.

  So is she. Her hair is everywhere. She’s not pale. She’s white. A color so like ivory that it looks like she’s had her skin dyed.

  “Are you hit?” I ask her.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Get him on his feet. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  I nod. Somehow I physically lift Dan from the ground. I get one of his arms around my shoulders. He looks as pale as Brodie. I wipe the spittle from his mouth and get Brodie to check him again. There’s no blood. Somehow both of them escaped without a scratch.

  Dan might be a mess now, but at least he came through when the going got tough.

  When the doors open, Dan’s legs start working of their own accord. Obviously his conscious mind is not working, but the automatic functions – breathing, circulation, walking – are still operational.

  The only evidence in the elevator that anything happened is the broken mirror at the back. Apart from that, there’s no evidence someone just tried to cut us to pieces in a hail of gunfire. Possibly Ravana and his cronies have their entire floor soundproofed. That’s the only explanation for why dozens of police aren’t pouring into the building. The racket upstairs was so loud it just made the Gunfight at the OK Corral look like a shooting gallery at the carnival.

  We cross the lobby. A business man, obviously heading back to the office to pick up some forgotten paperwork, gives us a curious glance, but I glare at him and he passes without comment.

  We escape the building. By that point I’m able to grab Dan’s shoulder and drag him along as we jog down the sidewalk to the car. My hands are still shaking by the time I climb behind the wheel, but there’s no way I can expect Brodie to drive. Despite her apparent calm, she’s still obviously a mess.

  “It was the furniture,” I tell them as we pull into the traffic.

  “What was?” Brodie asks.

  “I had a strange feeling about that lobby. There was nowhere for anyone to sit. I didn’t realize it at the time…”

  My voice trails away to nothing. It’s not important now. I keep checking the rear view mirror to see if anyone’s following. If they are, they’re good, because I can’t see them.

  Dan’s in the back seat. Up till now he’s been sitting up with his eyes staring into nothing. Now I notice he looks incredibly tired. He’s struggling to keep his eyes open. Must be the delayed shock. Sleep is the best thing for him. For all of us.

  “Things got pretty hairy back there,” I tell him as I weave around a truck. “But you came through, Dan.” I feel I need to bolster his spirits after the aborted attempt. “You really saved our skins.”

  Dan shakes his head. “No. No, that wasn’t me.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask him. “You saved the day back there.”

  “No I didn’t,” he says quietly. “I was a mess. There were bullets flying everywhere. I couldn’t do a thing. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t even think.” He shakes his head again. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Well,” says Brodie. “If it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Dan…”

  I know both of them are looking at me. I don’t know what to say. Up till now I haven’t displayed any abilities. Nothing at all. Now I think back to the hail of gunfire back at the building. It was a turkey shoot. Somebody saved them from certain death.

  Was it me?