There was an on-going petition going through the courts to arrest or stop the so-called female superhero presence putting gang members and criminals into the hospital. It was too much a joke that young punks and teenage felons were too scared to break the law because another teenage drug user was in the hospital with shattered legs or that another middle-aged pedophile nearly had his underwear pulled over his head. The district attorney was not going to press charges against an entity that in the real world just could not exist. If they actually placed a warrant on the town's Supergirl for countless assault and battery, District Attorney Ted Hardison revealed, they might as well put one out on Dracula for genocide and another on Santa Claus for decades of breaking and entering.
"You can't just keep replacing parts." In an apartment house five blocks off the interstate, Terri Pickler argued with her daughter. "That car is over twenty years old. You need a new one."
"Mom, I can't afford it!" Michelle argued back. "I've got a daughter to support by myself! Bill said he'd replace the alternator again; that will buy me more time."
"Your brother cannot keep that car going much further." Mother clashed with daughter. "It should have been junked years ago. If course, if you hadn't gotten pregnant in high school…"
"Don't go there!" Michelle snapped. "I haven't asked you for anything! You don't have any right to criticize my life!" Someone knocked at the door of her apartment. What were a few more minutes late for work? Hoping it was her ride, Michelle grabbed her jacket, pulled it on over the restaurant uniform for the Italian Bar and Grill in Detroit's eatery district and grabbed her purse. It wasn't Amanda Jennings at the door. It was a young girl with long blonde hair, a bulky jacket disguising her frame and a dark cap pulled down over to hide her face.
"Miss Pickler?" Bridget's voice replied and she held up a large envelope. "This is for you."
"Thank you…" Michelle took the strange envelope. Her mysterious benefactor turned away enigmatically and hastened away for places unknown. Wondering what sort of delivery she had acquired, she rendered her finger through the opening and popped open the top. She didn't believe it at first. It was several hundred dollars. Twenty five hundred dollars to be exact wrapped in an ad for a used car lot. A few used cars had been circled in the ad. Attached was a note: "Michelle, get a new car, S."
At the hospital, Cate Hennessey guided and took care of the patients. Another young mother suffered through labor pains until a room became available. A mom sat with her son to get him a tetanus shot. Another figure on the cusp of middle age waited to get his chest pains checked out. Cate waited taking blood pressure from him as he waited on Dr. Masterson or Dr. Grey. When he passed out of the danger zone, she headed out to secure a room for the expecting mother as the Emergency paramedics wheeled in another potential patient.
"All I did was try to steal a Mercedes!!" He was screaming in pain. "Was that so wrong?"
"Yes…" Cate checked him over. The young Hispanic's underwear band had been pulled almost a foot out the seat of his pants. The result was more severe damage to his lower extremities for indulging in a criminal career. It was the hundred-and eighty-ninth case for this hospital so far.
"He was pulled down off the billboard on Bauman Drive." Paramedic Carl Ferrigno reported with a smirk and turned the patient's chart over to Cate. Assistant nurse Marcy Walker started grinning ear to ear with a smug happy grin to her face. The young carjacker would have to wait for the next available room.
"I love this girl!" Marcy giggled to Cate over the felon. "I love her underwear fixation. It's about time these creeps got what they get coming to them."
"Marcy!" Cate chided her co-worker for that comment.
"Come on, Cate…" Marcy handed Cate a syringe of morphine. "I just wish she was around a year ago when I got mugged." Marcy grimaced sarcastically and looked down the hall to Dr. Masterson helping the pregnant girl. "I think I know who she is."
"Who?" Cate looked up with alarm.
"Come on, Cate, " Marcy leaned in secretly. "It's so obvious."
"Oh god, Marcy, please, don't…"
"It's Dr. Masterson." Marcy whispered to her under breath.
"What?"
"Think about it…" The plump but cute middle-aged mother continued. "Everyone says she looks like Reese Witherspoon. Liz looks like Reese Witherspoon. We know nothing about her private life. She got a shock from the X-Ray Machine the week before all these sightings…."
"You think…" Cate stopped and tilted her back listening. "Liz got special powers off an X-Ray Machine?"
"Yes!" Marcy insisted.
"What have we got here, ladies?" Dr. John Dorian poked past them.
"Oh, another impacted underwear…" Cate looked up and handed over the patient's file.
"What is this?" Dorian scowled looking over the file. "Two hundred this month?" Marcy had drifted off doing her job, but as she passed Dr. Masterson, she gave her a hearty and beaming thumbs-up. Liz just looked up at the gesture and wondered about it before moving on. Cate stayed with Dorian to prep and cut the underwear strung up around the Mexican youth's buttocks so the police could take him into custody. Strolling through intensive care, Cate checked on a burn patient from a home fire, another person possibly rescued by her daughter. In the bed next to him, Brad McKinnon lay on his stomach in incredible pain. He was going to need invasive surgery just to be able to go to the bathroom.
"Honey…" Cate padded his back. "I've got you something for the pain, but the doctors will need to take you into surgery this afternoon to remove your underwear. The good news is: the Castellari family settled out of court. You've only got a year of jail to serve."
"All I wanted is for her to like me!" The teenage rapist blubbered through his pain. That flying blonde had not only pulled his underwear up but had hung himself upside-down on a flagpole at city hall as a warning to other rapists!
"Oh yeah…" Cate gave McKinnon more morphine for the pain. "Raping her was a good way to do that!" She gave him a shot for the pain and discomfort to his manhood. As she moved on to a young woman with food poisoning, she looked up to Dr. Masterson strolling through checking the charts. Adjusting dosages and recommending new meds, the young beauty chanced upon Cate and gestured to her to talk. A moment to provide a comforting look to the young lady, Cate draped her stethoscope round her neck and glided toward Liz in the shadowy alcove of the medicine closet. The petite doctor looked up to her taller head nurse.
"Cate, I respect your opinion a lot and I want you to tell me something." Liz pretended to be checking inventory. "I need to know what all these…" She made a thumbs-up. "Gestures are going round me. Is there a rumor about me here?"
"It's really harmless. Kind of silly…" Cate adjusted some boxes to line up. Dr. Masterson cocked her head wanting the answer. "Um…" Cate continued. "Marcy and several others think you're that…" She chuckled a bit. "Supergirl in the news." She hid her smirk as Liz reacted absorbing the news. "Apparently, you look like her… a lot!"
"What?" Dr. Liz Masterson reacted with a mixture of ego, honor and embarrassment. "This makes so much sense. After Legally Blonde came out, I was getting approached by people who thought I was Reese Witherspoon." She paused and shifted her weight to her other leg. "What do you think?"
"I don't believe it myself." Cate confessed then became honestly frank. "To tell the truth, I think everyone has some sort of candidate they think she is. I mean…" She chuckled under breath. "My daughter, Kerry… She's been harassing her sister because she's convinced that she's Supergirl." She shared a stifled laugh.
"You mean, Bridget…" Liz reacted. "I could see that, but it is so not her. I examined Bridget. I drew blood from her and did a very thorough test. In my medical opinion, I can honestly say it is definitely not her!"
"Son of a…!!!" Bridget gripped her fingers around the back frame of a Nissan hatchback and once more started ascending skyward. As she wretched the car out of the reservoir, she began placing her hands in a better place to carry it. Hoping this teenage driver would listen more to the sound of screeching brakes than to his radio station, she glided effortlessly up over the bank and on to the side of the road. Someone else would have to fix the flattened fence. Eric Kutcher waited till all four tires of his car were back on terra firma as he and his girlfriend, Laura Hyde, were well out of the water. Bolting from the car, he and his friends raced to meet the blonde goddess to finally see her up close, but she had avoided being recognized once more by rushing away from the scene and flying out over the park toward the east side of town.
"Hey there…" Kyle Brady wandered into his bank with a check to his private account made out to cash. "Some money, por favor…" He mused to the bank teller to get some spending money for school and then noticed the lollipop tin on the edge of the counter. He immediately snatched a cherry flavor and ripped the plastic wrapper from it to stick in his mouth. As he stood waiting for his cash to be handed from him, someone came up behind him and knocked him hard to the floor.
"Hand over all the money!" Robert Edmunds and his three cohorts had been knocking over banks between Chicago and St. Louis. With the police looking for him along Interstate 55, he had slipped through the dragnet and escaped north to knock over a Detroit bank. His brother served as lookout in the getaway car with a police scanner and his cousin Stanley and two friends infiltrated the bank in a job they had timed to under a minute. Shooting out cameras and violently striking anyone who got in their way, they waved their illegal weapons ready to shoot to kill. Once he realized what was happening, Kyle hugged the course bank carpet with his hands over his head. In his head, he prayed he didn't get shot. Several bullets rendered through the plaster and wood structure as a hot knife through butter. People screamed and dived under and behind furniture. Teller Daphne Pryde felt her red hair pulled into a handle behind her head as Stanley Edmunds treated her as a disposable witness. Kyle clenched his eyes shut trying to ignore the deafening noise around him. He wanted to be a hero, but he couldn't move.
A glass skylight shattered and figure dropped into the bank moving at the speed of light. Five-time felon Todd Jamison was attacked first with a force of a hundred bricks kicked into his abdomen. Stanley Edmunds watched as his partner flew twelve feet across the bank lobby and hit the wall with a sickening crunch. He started firing upon the blonde in the red cape coming at him. He had killed girls smaller than she was. The girl might have been fast, she might have been strong, but he had the bullets and they scattered and strafed the walls upon ricocheting off her head and chest. To her, the sensation was like being pelted with a volley of cooked peas. Bridget charged forward again with the force of a hurricane and struck Stanley to his chest with one blow then turned to Jamison trying to cleave her head in two. Two slow for someone moving at the speed of sound, his elbow was shattered with the tip of her left hand. A brief moment for the joy of bending the Uzi into a paperweight, Bridget whirled round and looked to Robert Edmunds. He had heaved Kyle up off the floor as a human shield. They recognized each other!
"Bridget?!"
"One more fast move, and the geek gets it!!!" Edmunds refused to go to jail for his crimes.
Bridget reacted instinctively and charged forward as Robert's finger curled round the trigger of his weapon. There was an explosion next to Kyle's ear and he flailed to one side and fell to the floor. His body dropped into a heap, his eyes rolling back into his head and his legs going limp. It all happened within a second, but he was still alive. He had landed on his right shoulder, but as he opened his eyes he saw the bullet landing in front of him on the floor after him. It bounced once and then rolled round once facing him. How close had it been? He lay there a second wondering what was happening then reached over and took the bullet in his fingers. The bank lobby was stifled into silence. Nervous bank tellers, some of them still crying and afraid lifted up their heads. In the aftermath of the foiled robbery, witnesses, employees and customers slowly stood up or peeked from their hiding places. The lone security guard took his handcuffs and restrained Todd Jamison to the entryway. Stanley Edmunds was whimpering and bawling over his shattered right arm, the end of it hanging limply from his elbow. Everyone was asking each other about where was the third shooter and the Motor City's girl of steel. Had it really happened? What just happened here? Kyle rose up off the floor holding the bullet and searching for signs of a hole in his head.
There was a screaming noise from over their heads and Robert Edmunds fell through the shattered skylight, grazing and bouncing off the edge and then plummeting the twenty feet to the floor. The back of his underwear had been pulled up through his buttocks and he lit the hard floor with a thundering crunch, braking his left arm, collar bone and a few ribs as an added punishment for his life of crime and flaunting the law. Bawling with the screams of a giant baby, Edmunds screamed out in pain and looked up to the early evening sky to the object falling through it. His stolen Uzi had been balled into scrap metal, a cannonball to hit and bounce off his skull from off the roof. He began cursing a streak of profanity between blubbering words of nonsense from his wracked and broken body.
Somewhere outside, police cars were converging on the bank with lights flaring and sirens calling. Between the bank employees and customers praying and distantly thanking their local heroine, Kyle inched closely to Robert to look up through the shattered skylight. As he peered up through that opening, he heard the police cars arrive outside. Officers began escorting survivors and witnesses from the building. Kyle Brady could only search the skies for the girl who still had his heart.
"Bridget…." He whispered to his own ears.