Thank you to all the wonderful reviewers who gave me encouragement as I continue this story. I promise, I will not leave this story unfinished forever, not if I can help it. As always, not mine, blah blah blah, not for profit, blah blah blah, you get the point.
Remember, reviews are nice, but ideas and support are always better!
Static was just as glad to hear trouble on the horizon after hearing Gear's short and empty responses to his questions. It seemed like no matter what he tried, he could not get his best friend to give him an honest, factual answer to simple questions anymore. Things like "what's wrong" "how're you doing" and "whatcha thinking" went unanswered, or as good as unanswered anyway. Gear dodged the questions with random answers like "fine," "nothing," "working on a problem," or "huh," depending on the circumstances. Static didn't like it. His best friend was keeping secrets! So the distraction of hero-work was a welcome one to the electrified teenager.
As they flew in the direction of the chaos, Static glanced back at Gear flying at his side. Somehow, being like this, Static felt fully complete. He had loved being Static before, hero against bang babies, protector of Dakota, but somehow he never noticed it was an incomplete joy. But now, now that Gear, best friend and partner (not sidekick!) joined in on the hero-work, now Static felt fully realized and satisfied with it all. Now it felt right. He grinned a bit at Gear flying behind, was yet again amazed with Gear's ability to use those crazy boots to get around, and passed an approving eye over Gear's face. The tight worry, or occasional absent-mindedness he had seen so recently in his friend's face was gone. Now there was only the well-known "thinking" look, which Static took to mean that Gear was analyzing the situation from afar. Man, but it helped knowing what they were up against BEFORE they got the scene!
"Static, it looks like we've got some kind of new bang baby ahead, powers unusual…" Gear's voice trailed off as he tried to verbalize the information passing through his mind.
"Another one?" Static sighed. "How many new bang babies can there be? Man, it seems like every time something happens, it's got to be a new kid with new powers who still hates us! Sometimes I miss old Hotstreak. Stupid, but predictable!" He slowed down to watch Gear think. Gear's face was a quickly changing face that looked like it was trying to read Portuguese and then transform it into a chemical equation. "What is it, bro?"
"I'm not sure…" Gear trailed off again. The information coming in was just too weird to be believed!
"Well, we'll just have to go and see then. Can't waste time out here!" Static yelled, and before Gear could break his concentration to stop him, Static sped off on his board.
--==OOO==--
Chaos was the perfect word to describe it. A city street corner had gone from being perfectly normal with shops and peaceful pedestrians, to a center of utter chaos. Mostly, the people on the street were behaving very strangely, Static noticed as he came up, riding low on his board. Almost all of them were crying. He lowered himself to the ground, not seeing any mutated or even odd-looking people who could be meta-humans.
"I can't see, I can't see!" wailed a girl a few years younger than Static. He caught her arm and looked into her face. Her eyes were wide open, but she seemed to have trouble focusing. He shook her.
"Calm down! What happened?" Static asked. The girl's face turned in his direction.
"I don't know," she whimpered. "I was just walking along, and then I felt something, like a smack on the back of my head, and then I couldn't see!" She began to cry again. "I can tell that it's light out, and I can see your shape in front of me, whoever you are, but everything else is washed out. It's gone!"
Gear landed next to them, and pointed over to another group of people. These people were lying on the sidewalk, moaning and some of them yelling, all their voices tight with fear. Static helped the girl sit down on the sidewalk and moved with Gear to the group on the ground. Gear, eye critical and calculating, reached out and took a man's hand.
"What happened?"
"I don't know. But I was just waiting for the bus and…" a small tear slipped from the man's eye and slid down his dark cheek. "I fell. And now I can't seem to stand anymore." Richie looked over at the man's legs. They looked physically normal, but when the boys tried to help the man rise, he could put no weight on them at all. He crumpled to the ground with a groan somewhere between frustration and fear. Gear took Static's arm and led him away from the group.
"I surveyed the area. There look to be about 16 people suffering from this inexplicable blindness and 9 who can't stand. But there doesn't appear to be anything physically wrong with them!" He shook his head. Static could see the sweat standing out on Gear's face through his shielded helmet. "I mean, it looks like a random bunch of people, various ages, races, social classes, etc, just suddenly became afflicted with a plague!"
"What can we do, bro?" Static asked, nervously. Having seen the terror in the girl's now-blind eyes and the fear and frustration in the lame man, he did not want to experience it first-hand.
"I'm not sure. The best we can do for now, I think, is to try and establish some sort of control group. We need to know who didn't experience this, and maybe why they aren't suffering the way these other people are." Gear looked around carefully, nudging Backpack with his mind to seek out any other people in the area who were not incapacitated. Backpack came back with a moving subject 100 meters away. "There!"
Static was so glad of something to do, he jumped on his board before he saw what Gear was pointing at. It was a boy, blinking in the sunlight and moving rapidly away from the scene. As he started to follow on his board, he heard a terrible strangled cry and smelled smoke. Turning back, he saw Gear doing possibly the most stupid thing he had ever seen his partner do. Gear was flying straight into a store which was burning violently and rapidly to the ground.
--==OOO==--
Just as Static's heart began to lurch, he remembered the boy. The great hero's dilemma caught him: save the innocent people or chase the bad guy? Static pounded his fist into his palm with a snarl and moved back, away from the fleeing boy and towards the shop, now fully engulfed in flame. He smelled gasoline and something else, and the dark, oily clouds of smoke that coiled up from the shop into the sky told of a very strong accelerant behind the sudden blaze out of nowhere. Static used his powers to snap the top off of a nearby fire hydrant and warp the metal so the stream of water would aim in the right direction, although he knew it would take time before the water could out-do the force of the fire.
"Gear!" he shouted as the fire got hotter and the clouds of smoke thicker. Static's heart pounded. Where was he? He tried to peer into the inferno for his friend. "Gear!"
"Static…" coughed a voice from the fire. Then, "Help!" That was all the encouragement Static needed. He threw his arms over his face and went barreling into the burning shop.
The heat was intense, as was the smoke. This oily, smoky fire was nothing like Hotstreak's bursts of flame. Static's board caught on something and he lost his balance and fell to the ground. Coughing, he pulled down the goggles he sometimes wore on his head, glad of the little relief they gave his watering eyes. As he tried to breathe through the cloth of his costume, he spotted Gear, coughing and spluttering, trying to lift a woman from the floor. Static hurried over.
"Static," Gear coughed, his voice wheezing, "there are two more people there. I can't carry them all." Backpack was valiantly trying to drag the other, unconscious people towards them. Static gathered his powers and lifted them, and Backpack right along with them, although his head was buzzing from the smoke and he was covered with sweat from the heat.
"Can't take much more" he gasped as he hoisted the two into the air, drew his board near and got on. Gear, behind him, gathered the woman into his arms and shakily launched himself into the air. Static sent a tendril of his power back to help Gear fly through the smoke. He could feel his power draining as he slowly doused out his own electrical energy with sweat that dried in the heat but was quickly replaced. Coughing and near collapse, the pair emerged from the storefront to hear the welcome sound of sirens. They dropped to the ground and Gear ran quickly to check the pulse and breathing of the three victims. They were all alive, but only barely. None of them was getting enough oxygen.
"Static, we need an ambulance now!" Gear cried, pulling out Backpack and a make-shift hand-held respirator. It looked like a rubber balloon with a mouthpiece. He put the facemask over the face of one of the two people Static had rescued, a young man, and began compressing the bag with all his might.
Static launched himself back into the air, still coughing, now fully aware of his eyes streaming from the smoke and his throat burning. Some part of his mind also registered that if he was as covered with soot as Gear was, they both looked less like heroes and more like chimney-sweeps. Rising into the air, he saw the fire truck on the way, an ambulance just behind. He dropped down until he was along side the van and called into the driver "There's people who can't breathe! We think they're dying! They can't breathe!" he tried to yell over his own breathlessness and the roar of the wind as they raced through the streets. The driver nodded and shouted something back at the others in the van. Static, satisfied, flew on ahead to check on the people.
Returning to the scene, he noticed the building that was on fire for the first time. It was a bookstore, and something in his heart ached for the loss of the books. Sure he was a video game fiend, but he also knew and loved the power of the written word. Then the fire-truck and ambulance raced past him. Turning from the sight, out of the corner of his eye he saw the people who had been suddenly blind and lame again and turned to look over in confusion at the change in them. The girl he had spoken to before reacted with joy as he came near again.
"I can see again! I can see!"
"You can? How?" he said, more to himself than to her.
"I don't know. But I started to feel funny and then my eyes started to see, although I could only see a little, like I had been crossing my eyes. But slowly it got better and now I can see!" Static nodded to her distractedly and flew over to the man who had been paralyzed.
"Yes, I can use my legs again, too," the man from before said, relieved. "My legs started to hurt, and now they can almost hold me and it's getting better all the time."
"I'm glad," Static said, hurriedly, and worked away from the group to return to Gear to tell him how things had changed. As he moved around the parked fire truck to where he had left his partner, Gear trudged up to him wearily.
"They're going to be okay," he said quietly, turning to look at the medics who were intubating the three victims and putting them on oxygen. "They had all very nearly stopped breathing, and I tried to give them air, but it wasn't helping. But they'll be okay now, I think." His voice was strained and the cough that rattled behind his chest didn't sound good.
"You all right, Gear?" Static asked, noticing his own cough for the first time as it threatened to split him in two.
"We're both suffering from smoke inhalation, probably some burns on the interior lining of our lungs and trachea," Gear said automatically, sweat starting to make streaks in the grime on his face and neck. He coughed violently. "I was in there a while. I wouldn't have made it out without you, bro," he croaked weakly, trying to smile.
"The kid got away," Virgil said, trying to change the topic away from how close he'd been to losing his best friend. "I started after him but then I heard you and…and he got away," Static finished lamely.
"That's okay, bro, we saved the people. You know," a far-away look entered Gear's eyes as he made the "thinking hard" face that Static knew so well, "there's too many odd things here for it to be coincidence. There are the people who couldn't see" he ticked them off on a blackened finger, "the people who couldn't walk," another blackened finger, this one bleeding, "and then the fire. It's all too odd, especially when…"
"What?" Static practically shouted as Gear paused to "think hard" some more.
"Well, those three inside. It wasn't the fire alone that put them in that condition," he said, motioning over to the three victims who were now being placed on gurneys and loaded into additional ambulances that had arrived. "They weren't breathing before the fire was set. I'm sure of it. It wasn't the fire that did that."
"Then what? What could stop them from breathing? Were they strangled?" At Gear's shaking head, Static searched for possible answers and found none. "How? Why?" Static asked, almost frantically.
"I'm not sure. What could stop people from being able to see or walk? Unless there's an anti-Christ walking around that I'm not aware of, that should be impossible," Gear said, intending a joke. But a funny look came over his face and he turned towards the way the running boy had gone. Static looked in the direction, too, and remembered his Sunday school classes.
"It couldn't be…"