SuperHero

Whoever made me believe in superheroes was cruel.

A man couldn't have flown around without his cape smacking him in the face at least once. No one existed with the ability to lift a bus unless he'd been marinating in steroids for a couple years. Anyone who claimed they could talk to fish would've immediately been sent to the happy house. I still believed in them, though, and where did this belief in these fictional heroes leave me?

It left me with my dreams crushed to dust, the catastrophe unfolding before my eyes rubbing those dreams in my face.

The earth lurched from a massive shock wave, throwing me onto the sidewalk. I watched in silent horror as plumes of smoke rose from the skyscraper and clogged the sky with inky darkness. Even from a mile away, I heard the glass windows shattering, rippling out in waves from the source of the blast until the entire structure collapsed in a shower of rubble and slabs of concrete. Flaming pieces of metal shot into the clouds like fireworks.

I looked out at the ruins of the building—the building Papa had been in.

“Ellie! Ellie, where are you?” The terrified shriek chilled my blood. It was so loud that even though I was bawling, I could still hear it. I didn't want to hear it.

“Mama!” I shouted, reaching for the woman battling her way against the panicked crowd. Smoke from a fresh volley of flares congested the air and filled my nose. With their mouths wide open as they screamed, faces flashed through the black fire-clouds. They looked like banshees. Like death—barely there, but still tangible enough to drive their images into my memories like a bullet to the head. Slowly, and painfully, the chaos was killing me.

I was tiny, and no one would notice this little brunette girl huddled against the brick wall of the apartment building, trembling, eyes wide with horror as she witnessed soldiers blowing up the very people they should have been protecting. I was seven years old when I first saw death. When I first saw my friends murdered. When I first saw bodies burnt to a steaming crisp from the explosions, children with the flesh ripped off their faces, even a baby—or just the bloody foot that was left of it.

“Ellie, we have to leave before they—!” My mother's call was cut off as someone pushed her over. Her glasses were whipped off her nose as her face smashed into the pavement, scraping some of the skin from her freckled cheeks. No one thought of helping her up; they just wanted to get out of the city before they were locked in. Or shot. And if the price for their own survival was a young woman's life, then they'd pay it.

I curled into a ball like a roly poly, those dark little things I'd sometimes find on the sidewalk. When threatened, they'd roll up to protect themselves, but the puckered position offered me little security as I tried to hide from the madness. I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears with trembling hands.

I wasn't quick enough to block out the sight and sound of hundreds of feet trample my mother to death.

“MAMA!”

The world was breaking around me. Each shattered piece cut me and hacked away at every reality I had ever known. Each second of this chaos wiped away another life, another future. Another star blinking out of existence, leaving darkness in its wake. Death. This was what looking at death felt like.

My mother was dead.

I barely got time to grieve; a few moments later, the gunshots sounded only a few yards from me. My stomach clenched as I grasped a sickening thought: the Army was here.

“By order of His Majesty King Damon, Territory 42 is being locked down,” boomed a voice somewhere in the distance, amplified with a bullhorn. “All inhabitants will be put into the honorable service of our king. Please remain calm. Leaving the city without clearance will result in military action.”

I peeked over my knees and saw a group of twenty soldiers aim their weapons at all of us, and they weren't measly handguns, either; these were rocket launchers—huge tubes of artillery the soldiers held up on their shoulders with enormous barrels that held probably giant ammo.

I barely comprehended them. These death machines were at the back of my consciousness, just touching the surface of my thoughts. My eyes remained focused on the lifeless body in the middle of the road.

She's just sleeping, right? She'll wake up soon. She's going to wake up. . . .

“Mama, wake up. . . . P-Please. Mama, I'm scared!”

A bullet whizzed past my nose, and the part of my brain that controlled self-preservation began firing until my entire mind screamed at me to run. Choking back the hysteria that should have accompanied my mother's violent death, the fear set my mind on autopilot, and I jumped to my feet and fled toward the river of bodies ramming into one another in the street. Trying not to glance down at my mother's corpse, I blindly ran at the edge of the throng. Everyone was screaming so loudly that I couldn't even hear myself cry.

Someone was shoved into me, and that someone was a two-hundred pound man. His flailing body knocked me off the street and into a broken shop window. The sharp glass cut into my legs as I sailed headfirst into the small building, and the shards on the ground inside ripped the skin on my face and hands. The adrenaline rushed through my body so rapidly that the pain soon subsided, and I got back to my feet, albeit shakily.

The light bulbs in the shop had been shattered. Hoping I could hide in the resulting darkness, I took a few steps forward, but I tripped over a soft mass lying on the ground. My first thought was that I had fallen on top of a mannequin, but when my eyes finally adjusted to the dim lighting, I couldn't scream loud enough.

It was a dead body.

A quick glance around the room verified my fears: more corpses. Seven of them.

As fast as my muscles could move, I scrambled out of the shop and back into the street, large streams of smoke flying out in the trail of a recently launched rocket.

Before I had time to register what was going on, a bomb exploded, sending a scalding wave of hot air at me and knocking me onto my back. Luckily, I'd only been at the edge of the blast, and it hadn't burned me. My vision blurred from the constant stream of tears flowing from my eyes. I tried to look around for a place to hide, but all I saw were soldiers, shooting at the crowd and tossing grenades around as easily as if they were hacky sacks.

It was as if the air around me had turned to a block of ice, freezing me in place when my eyes locked onto the missile. Sparks shot out of the melon-sized barrel, and the large orb of gunpowder sped toward me.

I realized that I was about to die. Be blasted to bits.

I looked into the sky, silently praying to God like Mama taught me. But the sun was gone—eclipsed by black smoke and dust—and I couldn't feel the warmth of His love like Mama said I would.

Then someone grabbed me.

He was warm. So warm.

His sweatshirt against my cheek caused relief to wash over me; now I wouldn't die alone. For the first time that day, I felt safe. Someone was there, watching over me, protecting me from any more harm.

The boy stuck out an arm, pointing his palm at the missile, which was still hurtling toward us like an angry bull. My heartbeat quickened in what I had thought were my last moments of life.

Just before the orb touched my protector's hand, his entire body tensed, and the arm around me tightened so hard that I felt all the air squeezed out of me.

Then the missile froze in midair.

I saw it happen right before my eyes, but I still couldn't believe it.

It just stopped in front of his outstretched hand, creating a strong gust of air around us and kicking up a cloud of dirt that stung my eyes and choked my lungs. By some miracle, the missile headed back toward the soldier that had launched it. Before the man knew what was happening, it detonated in his face, killing him in a burst of white light and a tremendous BOOM that shook the ground.

Trembling, I tilted my head up to see who my savior was, expecting to see a face. Instead, I saw something strange.

A mask.

Black and gold, it covered the top half of the boy's face so only his hazel eyes were visible, burning like two glorious suns.

“Close your eyes,” he murmured into my ear. Still confused, I just did as I was told. The boy let go of me, and I felt wind pound on the top of my head. With his comforting warmth gone, I shivered. When I finally mustered the courage to open my eyes again, I let out a gasp.

I didn’t see billows of smoke churning through the sky anymore. I saw the sun. I saw the beautiful, bright, golden sun.

Because I was on the roof of a ten-story building.

The boy was nowhere to be seen, and he’d left me completely on my own. Crawling to the edge of the roof and peering over, I watched the massacre play out like a horror movie on the streets below. In the distance, the gates to the city started to swing shut, and even from my height, I heard hysterical screaming.

With a loud, echoing clank, the gates closed. The sound resonated through the city, reverberating through my body like the ripples of a shock wave. That sound meant that King Damon had successfully locked down an entire city.

And now I was his slave. We all were.