12

"Unless you've been in a cave for ten years," John Walsh spoke from the TV-series, America's Most Wanted. "You probably aren't aware that Detroit is now being protected by a one-woman strike force. That's right, I said a one-woman strike force. A plucky young blonde wearing a "Supergirl" costume has been popping up all over the Motor City saving people and fighting crime. I'm not sure if I believe half the stuff they claim she's been doing, but I just got to say well done to this young lady and keep up the good job. She comes into us with Capture 978: Eldon Luther Browerman whose been stealing cars and shooting at police between Chicago and Detroit and all over the Great Lakes area."

"I'm going to kill that blonde…" Browerman's rant was censored over network TV.

The real-life Supergirl was popping up all over the area. Two verified sightings in Ann Arbor, a few across the bay over in Windsor, Canada. There were a few debated sightings in Toledo, Ohio and footage taken of the flying female twenty miles out over Lake Erie. DC Comics cancelled their cease-and-desist order against the Detroit police after their sales for their Superman comics with Supergirl started going through the roof. Marvel Comics jumped on the bandwagon with a Supergirl/Wolverine crossover followed by a Spiderman/Supergirl. There were talks of the female character being added to the "Smallville" TV series.

"It's her!!!" Random by-standers would scream when she soared over Detroit. The people who didn't believe in her looked up, but her believers carried cameras trying to get her on film. She was seen a lot along Interstate 94 and around Patton Memorial Park. Rumor was she hid her civilian clothes in a tomb at Holy Cross Cemetery. Most public of the rumors claimed that was really at least eleven different women in town and despite a battery of police-authorized tests, each of these women remained unconfirmed. As police forensics tried to explain how tempered steel could be bent by human hands and how a young girl could fly through the air, a young local actress named Amber Tisdale claimed she was really Supergirl to the press and nearly received the key to the city, but she was busted when the real thing at the exact same time rescued fishermen off their sinking boat twelve miles off the Michigan coast in Lake Superior.

"Girls!" Nurse Nancy Gordon screeched into the nurse's station at St. Thomas Hospital. "She's here!!"

"Who?" Dr. Masterson sipped her coffee and looked to Cate and the nurses on break.

"Her!!!"

Everyone stormed out at once and an old man on an oxygen tank stopped and watched from his seat. The strangely clad beauty in the red cape and short pleated skirt was carrying in an emergency case. The accident victim was from a smashed car off Highway 102. Both his legs were shattered and he had breathing trouble from impact to the chest. Bridget marched him in her arms into the Emergency Ward and placed him onto an empty gurney. Doctor John Dorian saw the young blonde superhuman out the corner of his eyes and only from behind, but her stature and presence seemed oddly familiar. His attention was more to the patient.

"Compound breaks to both legs and internal trauma." Bridget lightly dropped off the young man in her arms onto the gurney and turned quickly to avoid her mother. She hastened quickly back out from the stunned and awkward silence and looked back to the sky, her feet departing earth again. The only thing Cate saw as she rushed round the corner was the brief image of a red caped young blonde outside the building on the entrance into emergency and the same exact image lifting into the sky. She rushed out after her trying to pull that girl down to earth to confront her but missed her by a few feet.

"Get your ass back here, young lady!!!" She saw the figure vanishing over the insurance building next door.

Rory had other plans to bust Bridget. He had used the old car battery to explode his miniature volcano for school; it had been quite successful. Maybe too successful, it had seriously burned three kids, a substitute teacher and nearly burned down his classroom. Salvaging the battery, he carried it up to his sister's room and took it into the room. Lying across her bed reading Emily Dickinson, Kerry looked up to her brother with the battery. He had two wires from it and was soldering one wire to the inside of the doorknob ad then pushing the other wire through the keyhole to the other side.

"Rory," Kerry tossed her long curly locks to her left shoulder. "What are you doing?"

"Well," He looked up to her from the floor with a mission. "You're not doing anything so I'm setting up a "Bust-Bridget" trap. You see," He demonstrated with a screwdriver as a pointer. "You have the exact same doorknob I do. Twisting it makes a metal-on-metal contact. I've got enough juice here to seriously shock a normal person. If Bridget is normal, she'll lose feeling in her hand for a while, but if she's not…"

"It won't affect her!" Kerry grinned with her eyes lighting up. "That's brilliant."

"If this doesn't work, I'm ordering kryptonite from a catalog." He added with a smarmy gleam to his grinning face.

"Once again you apparently confirm genius is only passed along the women in the family." Kerry rolled her eyes at his idiot remark. "Want some help?"

"Hold this…" He had Kerry hold a wire as he soldered it to the base plate. They heard a sound from downstairs, their father coming into the house and then Bridget in the down the stairs from them in kitchen. She told their father that mom wasn't home yet and that Kerry was upstairs reading. She didn't know where Rory was. From the sound, it appeared someone was coming up the front stairs. Rory quickly soldered as Kerry stood as lookout. Waving the fingernail polish dry on her fingers, Bridget came round the end of the corner coming toward them. Reaching her fingers under the bottom of the door to keep from getting electrocuted, Kerry pulled her bedroom door shut with her and Rory outside the room. Bridget strolled up with her attention to her brand new pink fingernails and looked up to her siblings now standing up before her.

"What's going on here?" She asked.

"Nothing." Rory claimed.

"Just talking…" Kerry had a knowing little grin.

Bridget looked at her suspiciously and turned to Rory. He had the same cat-swallowed-the-canary-grin-about him as well. Blowing her nails dry, Bridget wondered what mischief they were up to.

"Rory, get the door for me…" She asked.

"Sure…" He suddenly screamed from his hand completing the circuit through the wired doorknob. He dropped through the open doorway as Bridget jumped back from the sparks off the door. Kerry gritted her teeth in disbelief and hissed under breath before screaming at the stupidity of her brother.

"You are an idiot!!!" Kerry screamed at her brother and turned the other way in disgust, stamping her feet upset down the hall to the main staircase. Bridget noticed the battery and wires on her doorknob and made a noncommittal face as if she did not want to know what was happening. She was sure she didn't want to know. Her hands held aloft as if she were an expert surgeon, Bridget sat down upon to her bed and drew her long legs up on to the bed.

"You're going to clean that up, right?"

"Bridget, please…" Rory held his limp right hand under his left arm. The shock he took felt just slightly above the impact he felt from walking across a wool carpet and touching an iron lamp. "I got to know…" His voice was emotionally assuring and sympathetic. "You have to tell me."

"If this is about a certain flying blonde with a D-cup and a cape, I'm not talking about her." Bridget abruptly stopped that line of talk.

"Bridget," Rory pleaded from the side of the bed. "I have to know. I'm your brother. My powers haven't kicked in, but yours have…"

"Oh my god…" The blonde one couldn't believe she was hearing this and looked away.

"I can help keep your secret." Rory reached out to her conscience. "I wouldn't even tell anyone. You have to tell me, I'm your brother!"

"Rory…" Bridget cringed disgustedly and shook her head in ignominy. "Close the door, I want to talk to you."

"What?" The thirteen-year-old boy's face lit up excitedly and he swung around to close the door. Shocking his left hand this time, he shrieked from the pain and tore his wires loose angrily. Bridget was going to tell him. She was actually going to tell him. His heart started pumping excitedly. His eyes were widened in excitement. He spun on his left foot and sat near his sister ready to hear the truth. Bridget was confessing to him, not Kerry! This was the most exciting day of his life!

"Rory…" Bridget looked into her brother's brown eyes. "I think I figured out who she really is." She whispered. "I think she's really Kerry!"

"What?" The boy's excitement turned to confusion.

"Think about it…" Bridget pretended to be her old self. "If she can fly and lift cars, she must also be able to change how she looks, and who else more than Kerry would want to look exactly like me! It makes so much sense!"

"What?" Rory couldn't think for himself.

"Why else would she be trying to convince you that she's me?" Bridget was using her favorite weapon – confusion! "I mean, think about it, if you were like… I don't know, Spiderman, wouldn't you be like accusing your best friend of your secret identity so no one would ever expect yourself? It makes so much sense!"

"Oh, my god…" Rory sat in stunned silence. "It does make so much sense!"

"Exactly!!!" Bridget was grinning ear-to-ear at how easy it was to manipulate him. "But…" She calmed Rory back to confidentiality. "But we can't confront her over this." She shook her head. "No, we can't." Bridget shook her head and placed her arm around her brother. "We have no idea how powerful she is. I mean, she could turn us into frogs or something."

"I'm scared!"

"I'll protect you." Trying not to laugh, Bridget pulled her baby brother close. "Even if Kerry turned me… oh my god, brunette… I'll fight to keep you from being turned into a frog!"

"I love you, Bridget!" Rory hugged her back.

"I love you too, Froggie!" Bridget was containing her laughter, but it wasn't easy. "Wait, I gotta get to the mall!" She pranced to her feet and grabbed her purse. She turned back to her brother. "But remember… don't tell Kerry! Our lives depend on it!"

"You can depend on me!" Rory turned to the door and grabbed the doorknob, shocking himself again just as the feeling in his hand came back. Swearing at himself, he ripped the last wire loose and grabbed the battery from the floor. He beamed back to his sister with everlasting trust and friendship. Pulling her fall jacket on over her sweater, Bridget looked up to the ceiling and the heavens beyond it.

"I'm not proud of what I just did…" She told the gods in heaven listening. "But sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do." She grabbed her purse and headed out of her bedroom for the back staircase. In the kitchen, her father was re-heating last night's leftovers and baking chicken to replace last night's stroganoff.

"I'm off to the mall!" She called leaving the house.

"Need any money?" Paul started to reach for his wallet, but Bridget was already gone. He held his wallet aloft. "You missed getting picked clean my friend." He kissed it and returned it to his back pocket.

"You are an idiot!!!" Kerry emerged from the downstairs bathroom. "She's not me!!!"

"Bridget said you'd say that!" Rory confronted her. "We know your insidious secret. You're not turning us into frogs with brunette hair!"

Paul listened to his son and tried to shake that comment from his ears. Did he really just say that?

"Where is this coming from?!" Kerry yelled back at him. "You can't be this stupid! Do you really believe…" Kerry just froze and dawned on what had just happened. "Oh my god, I just figured it out…" Her voice calmed. "I can't believe it. She's playing us…" She turned to her father then back to Rory with her right hand over her lips.

"Kerry?" Paul looked to his middle daughter.

"We are never going to bust her." Kerry thought out loud. "She's not Bridget. She's become smart… she's become… actually clever, almost genius with powers and abilities to boot. It's as if… she's become a new person, someone with an entirely new personality within Bridget's body."

"You mean…" Rory tried to pick up on her line of thinking. "She's possessed or something." He thought it over. "But… she's been doing nothing but helping people."

"I liked your first theory that she had super powers." Paul stirred his pot of Brussels sprouts and snacked on a stalk of celery. "Look, guys, please, please, stop with the cockamamie conspiracy theories. There is nothing wrong with your sister. People change and they do not get superhuman powers like people in the comic books."

In the woods near Patton Park, Bridget raced through the woods running faster and faster until she was practically invisible to human senses. Her hands pulled open the front of her shirt to reveal the red-and-yellow crest across her chest, she stepped out of her skirt with her feet lifting off the earth and stuffed her clothing into her purse, allowing her body lifted up by the mystical ley lines of the planet. A cape flapping from her shoulders, her right arm stretched ahead of her to hold her course, she shot out from the top of the trees shaking them to the branches and roots and disturbing a few birds and squirrels watching this mere mortal gain the status of forgotten gods. Once reaching five hundred feet above the ground, Bridget felt at peace with the world and finally happy with the person was. She drew her right arm back, allowing these ethereal ley lines of the planet pull her along their course with the winds carrying her along. Her long hair wafting and buffeting in her personal jet stream, she looked down content and happy upon a worldview saved only for birds, airplane pilots and the gods up high. Her left hand holding on to her purse strapped over her left shoulder, her eyes perused houses, shops, stores and buildings. A few handfuls of people caught a brief glimpse of her, but for Bridget, she had a brief second to see them and then they were out of her view. A flurry of birds too slow for her scattered and retook formation around her. For her, it was like looking down upon a tremendous model landscape stretching out in all directions. The Detroit skyline was still a steel canyon even at this height as she wafted and dodged around their surly heights with the agility and grace of a floating ballerina dancing through the sky. A few witnesses saw her fly past their twelfth floor offices, but by time they turned around, the real life maiden of might was already gone.

Coming up on the mall, Bridget stopped and hovered high above Addison Street beneath her. She had heard a crashing sound behind her. She turned her head over beyond the store tops and panned along distant Schuster Drive lined with restaurants and specialty stores. She noticed streaked tire treads going through the stoplight three blocks from her and followed them to the brake lights across the road into her favorite coffee shop with the $2.10 frappuchinos. Someone had not stopped in time to make the light and had smashed into through the front of the structure. They could be hurt.

Sailing down along Decatur, her left hand tossing her purse and clothes on to the roof of the Burger King next to her, Bridget soared down lower and lower toward the road coming up at her. Motorists stopped as the flying blonde returned to earth. The car had slammed through the table area, smashing chairs and tables. Five people had dived to the walls or jumped over the front counter, now shoved a few people into the back of the store. The three employees on duty were shaking and scared. Were they in trouble? Did they have to clean this up? They then started noticing cuts and scrapes and tried getting help from the back of the shop left unfazed. One customer staggered to his feet limping on one good leg. Confused pedestrians stopped wondering what to do and trying to help as they watched and wondered about the young beauty from the sky. Her feet reaching ground once more, Bridget hastened to the driver in the car and opened his driver's side door.

"Are you okay?" Bridget ignored the people pointing and watching her. The driver's side air bag had exploded and twenty-eight year-old Mike Kinsey staggered confusingly from the car coughing and clutching his chest. One minute, he'd been talking to his wife, the next he'd seen the red light and the coffee shop coming around his 2002 Ford Tempo. Bridget's hand briefly supported him and her eyes discovered movement in the car. Kinsey's wife, Brenda, was struggling to reach over the front car seat to the car seat in back. Her one-year-old daughter was looking around wondering what was happening.

"I've got her!" Bridget opened the back door and slipped into the car. "Just get yourself out."

"Who are you?" Brenda blinked her eyes at Bridget before concerned by-standers pulled and helped her out of the car. Figuring out the baby seat, Bridget beamed over the young girl before her staring at her with big brown eyes and unlatched her body straps. She started reaching around her when she realized she smelled something. Her eyes looked out over the front of the car to the bright yellow flames popping up over the grill. Beyond the smell of gasoline fumes, she smelled natural gas bursting from a cracked pie in the shop. It was not going to be good.

"Oh sh-"

The natural gas and flames hitting each other exploded on contact creating a huge fireball totally incinerating everything around the vehicle. People were blown off their feet, hitting the hard sidewalk and being flung into the street. A police car stopped to guide the accident from getting worse. The fire station was five blocks away. The explosion set off car alarms and cracked the walls in the neighboring antique store and bookstore also being evacuated. Coffee shop employees crawled out the back into the alleyway with black smoke wafting out over their heads. Anything at the core of the explosion would be gone. The flash fire cracked ceramic cups, raced along paper napkins and cardboard boxes and melted Styrofoam cups into nothing. One employee pulled off her smoldering apron. A bystander jumped from burning ash. A smaller series of explosions came from in the burning coffee shop as Brenda Kinsey started realizing her husband didn't have their daughter. Witnesses started wondering where their local superhero was. Could she not have survived the explosion? Was she going to start strolling out unfazed and untouched like a special effects movie?

The fire truck arrived and firemen scrambled to hook their hoses and start spraying the fire. Another police car had stopped and all traffic on the street was blocked off. Witnesses were pushed from the scene. Brenda started screaming for her daughter. Her husband tried to get to her but fell to her feet. Why was no one doing anything? Lonnie Reeves of Detroit Fire Station Eighteen waited for the signal he had water and took his place to hit the flames. He lifted his gaze to the figure in the burning former coffee shop starting to stagger out to him.

"Someone's in there!" Ambulance paramedic Ken Olin screamed out loud. The watching on-lookers started cheering to see their heroine still alive, but then the sound turned to concern and worry. She was not so invulnerable after all. Clutching a small figure wrapped up in her cape, she hobbled forward into the open smoking and charred. Her long blonde hair almost wholly gone; long strands of it still hanging in pieces from the top of her head. Her skin and body was burned and ashen. Her legs shakily trying to support her as she ambled weakly from the store. She lifted her head to Brenda held back by Olin and lifted up the child wrapped in her cape. The small child looked around completely unhurt.

The fire department started expunging the flames and the police officers watched with shock the other surprised and concerned witnesses. This girl in the costume had survived gunfire and car accidents and had risked her life to save and shield this stranger's child from harm and it had taken all of her might to do so. Taking her daughter, Brenda watched as her daughter's rescuer stepped back and collapsed to her feet into the street. There was a gasp from the crowd to see this strange woman once so powerful now a mere mortal.

"There's an ambulance over here." Officer Steve Wayne tried to help the former beauty to her feet. "Let me help…"

"No…" Bridget coughed up smoke and ash. Her lungs were on fire. Her nerves barbecued and her eyes dried husks. Her body was about to collapse. She reared herself to her feet wondering what had happened to her, wandered toward the bookstore amidst the stares and people taking her picture with their camera phones. No one would recognize her like this, and she couldn't go home like this. The concerned were whispering, the indecent and rude screamed questions of dissent while others still believed in her powers. The fire blazing behind her, she braced her body against the bookstore, looked back to the paramedics coming at her with a stretcher and lifted her head to the heavens once more.

Before the stunned rescuers, her body lifted into the air a few feet, her speed gradually improving with her height. Gritting her teeth in pain, Bridget clawed at the air trying to gain more height. Twenty feet high, she gasped for air, coughing up mucus from her lungs, and nearly fell from where she was. At fifty feet high, she screamed to the gods of heaven and stretched her clenched fist to the clouds. Her body ravaged and burned beyond recognition, she strained harder and harder to hold on to the ley lines that carried her. She could see beyond the block, leaving behind the people watching her from Schuster Drive over a hundred feet below, and then the horizon far to Lake Superior. Her body continued fighting gravity, she reached the height of air traffic and fought to get beyond that. The gasoline had poisoned her, so had the gas, which fueled the coffee shop. Reaching sub-orbital height was never so difficult before. Bridget gasped in the wet moist air of the clouds and reached pure sunlight at last.

Direct sunlight reaching her, dark violet space above her, Bridget gasped easier now. Her lungs breathed easier now, but her body was still burned and fried. Her eyes finally opened to see the melted flesh all over her body. Her voice cracked in shame to see it like this. Her looks had been ravaged; her beauty taken from her. She shed a tear feeling unattractive and fell backward unconscious.

Once her mind shut down, she started plummeting back to earth. The atmosphere started screaming and whistling around her. Friction began trying to slow her fall by heating her up. Pieces of her cindered clothing flew off her body and her body tumbled and rolled over and over. Eventually, her unconscious body righted itself up, the weight of her body falling first with her legs and arms flailing in the hasty descent. The ground started coming up fast.

Around fifteen thousand feet up, Bridget turned her head and opened her eyes partially to the sunlight off Cass Lake off to the northeast. It was only about twenty-five miles for her, but she could just barely make it… or not. Weaving through the land coming up fast was the Rouge River cutting through the land to the St. Clair Waterway. At eight hundred feet she reached out to the river and restored her power of flight. She leveled off, the wind speed breezing into her instead of against her. She reached the river edge and let go again, falling like a stone deep into the river, her body carried by the water current.

Her mind drifting to sleep once more, Bridget heard distant voices calling to her mind. Singing voices in chorus filled her senses. It was from the voices of a hundred spirits from the earth calling and urging her to carry on. Her unconscious body wafted and washed through rapids and over a flooded dam under the surface of the water. The blonde one expunged her last breath from her lungs and continued dozing off. Her mind was hallucinating. She was at Troy, her lover, Paris, slaughtered by the Argives and his blood on her dress. Beyond that, Egyptian warriors fought Hittite armies with spear and bow. Burning oil pyres illuminated the shadow of the Great Pyramid. Ancient magicks, more ancient and more mysterious, were trying to tell her something. She was on a Saxon battlefield, Viking hordes in steel helmets and horned headgear clashing en masse on horseback. The smell of blood and death was around her. Her mind was on British soil as Celtic and Gaul armies clashed with the Roman legions invading her homeland. The red-bearded and long-haired Arthur pulled Excalibur screaming at the strength of already forgotten Celtic deities ready to bring Christianity to the British Isles. The enchanted sword burst with light in her mind.

Bridget's eyes woke and her arm pierced the water surface with revenge against the injuries she had. The pain was gone, those familiar tingling and racing sensations returning to her. A quick gasp of air for her lungs, and she dived deep once again for the power of Mother Earth. Her powers were from the Earth, not beyond. Earth, air, fire, water… the voices had chanted. Poisons to the planet could harm her. The fire was caused by gasoline, made from oil, but there was natural gas there too. That might have stopped it from killing her. Hiding in the wash under the rapids, Bridget watched her scabs and burns washing off of her. Her beauty was coming back. Her long hair, now wet and saturated, was falling down around her shoulders once more. Her skin was returning pink and perfect once more. Breathing easier, Bridget hugged herself realizing she was getting stronger again. That strange force in her body was returning to her. Her fingertips tingled, her body started feeling perfect and she awoke again with the presence she could do anything. Her lungs filled with air and released it in the form of a satisfying gasp. Then she realized she was in trouble…

"Oh no…" Her mind realized the damage. The fireball had ruined her costume. One sleeve was completely gone except for the cuff. From her waist up to her neck, she had been exposed to her abdomen and chest. "Oh no… oh no…. No, no, no, no, no…" She began fretting. "Crap!!!" Her red skirt was barely staying on her. One red stocking boot hung down around her right ankle. All she had to cover her burned bra was her other sleeve, scorched and frayed by the flap of fabric still attached to the lower part of her leotard. Clenching her teeth, she began swearing a volley of incoherent syllables into a stream of nonsensical gutteral profanity.

"I guess I'm going to the mall after all..." She told herself, tying her last scraps of costume around her bust and stood to her feet before lifting off into the sky.