18
Having spent much the night over Canadian air space and briefly over the North Pole, Bridget was passing through the airspace over Hastings, Montana when the radio signals broadcasting the Amber Alert for seven-year-old Lottie Gutierrez went out over the radio and television. The beautiful dark-haired girl had just ran down to the corner market on her street and after an hour, her distracted mother realized her child was not back and safe. Checking with her daughter's friend, Carla Gutierrez ran up and down the street alerting all her friends, and when her husband came home, she was already hysterical and screaming.
Out on Highway 12 at the Schuster Brothers Wrecking Yard, part-time employee Miguel DeJesus pulled into the yard and drive straight for the car crusher on the property. Flicking a joint from his mouth to the ground as he turned off the engine and got out of the driver's seat, he looked around the lot of wrecked cars stacked five and eight high in a maze around him and wandered directly and emphatically for the trunk of his far. Unlocking the back with his keys, his brown skinny arms opened his trunk and his hands reached down and lifted up a rolled up rug from his mother's house bound and taped in a bundle with duct tape. He had done seven of twenty years for the rape and attempted murder of a girl in Brooklyn, New York. He wasn't letting another girl slip away that couldn't keep a secret and what luck, there was already a stripped Oldsmobile in the crusher. Kids were getting killed in junkyards all the time. Tossing the bundle in the back window, he casually turned around with a scowl on his unholy Hispanic features and descended into the operator's booth. The key to switch the crusher on wasn't there, but it couldn't be that different than hotwiring a car. Two spliced wires, the bandana on his head to wipe his fingerprints away and the machine was accidentally left running. Several tons of hydraulic force started caving the scrap iron of another car together as he pulled another handmade joint from his pants pocket. As he turned toward his car, the humming noise of the hydraulic press stopped, the crunching of metal ceased and squealing hydraulics started screaming.
The joint dropped from his thin lip as he turned around.
Her feet on the floor of the crusher, Bridget caught the top lid of the machine in her fingers then flipped her hands under it with her shoulder to start lifting it up. Ten tons were coming down on the car; she had lifted much more. Her presence had stopped this brutal machine, but struggling against it was causing oil lines to pop off and dance around like dancing snakes, the hydraulic press had never tried fighting anyone with the power of a god. Teeth gritting together, eyes squinting, the blonde maiden of might fought to push the huge top hinge of the car crusher back on itself. Holding it back with her left arm and shoulder, her right hand grabbed the back door of the Oldsmobile and ripped it off. Watching it sail fifty feet across the yard, Miguel stopped staring and shaking his head with his mouth open and dashed to his car, pulling the car door open and rushing to get his keys in the ignition. He looked back to see where he was backing as his car suddenly lurched to a stop. He looked forward again and saw Bridget looking straight at him through his dirty windshield; her face was not happy.
Feeling his car tipping backward, Miguel struggled to open his car door, but the stress of the bending car had warped it shut. It was already straight up on its trunk when he dived for the open passenger side window and was then smacked into the ceiling as the car finished flipping over. As he crawled out, two bright red boots came to meet him and two dainty female hands lifted him off his feet.
"You're not real! You can't be real!" Miguel was screaming out of fear for the first time in his life in his thick Mexican accent.
"Hi, pookie…" Bridget shined to him. "Do you want a girlfriend? Well, good news, by this time next month, you'll be dating a seven foot tall skinhead and sharing a room with him in prison." A cute little evil grin from Bridget and a dash of images sped by too fast for his mind to register, Miguel felt his underwear pulled up over his head and his external male anatomy driven deep into his body. The Montana State Police would borrow a truck from the phone company to pull him off the neon sign of the local movie theater. Although dosed with a near fatal dose of drugs, tiny Lottie was returned to the grateful arms of her pining mother.
On the west side of Chicago, police chief Don Kowalski donned battle gear and a bullet proof jacket to join David Rossi, Derek Morgan and Eliot Reid of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit to capture Federal outlaw Ty Haggerty, the leader of the anti-government Sons of the Confederacy terrorist group. The underground group was filled with members of the Ku Klux Klan, wanted criminals and several disenchanted former Americans who did nothing but complain about the government and nothing to do anything to change the system but strong-arm their own candidate into the Chicago mayoral race and kill off two police detectives investigating them. The BAU also had evidence linking to them one of the largest drug and marijuana rings in North Illinois. Expecting a fire fight, the Chicago Police Department along with SWAT and the three FBI agents raced to the deserted motel on the edge of town with their warrant to arrest Haggerty and take him down. Motorists watched the flashing lights and speeding police vans on Highway 41. They stormed the courtyard of the motel and rushed to their places with military precisions. Kowalski was there as SWAT took their places.
"Ty Haggerty…" Chief Kolwalski stood behind the SWAT team in their battle shields as he made the arrest. "We have a warrant for your arrest! Come out, with your hands up!"
Inside Room 17 on the bottom floor, Haggerty grinned with an evil grin. He had an inside man in the police department and knew they were coming. Armed with enough weapons to seize a small country, he had loyal Sons of the Confederacy in all the rooms around the courtyard. This was going to be a bloodbath, and he was taking as many of them out first. On his signal, the battle broke out as shots rained down across the courtyard. Surprised police officers ducked for cover as Rossi took a shot. Another officer went down. Automatic weapons sprayed the officers hiding from the sudden war zone they were unprepared for. It was just another war in the battle against organized crime, and Haggerty had no problem taking out police officers. He proved that when he gave the order to take out those detectives. People were going to be reading about him for years after he was gone. He was seeing himself as a patriot who took down a fascist government. One of his lieutenants took a flash grenade from a crate stolen from the police weapons locker to blind the police from the slaughter to come; he tossed it over the balcony and saw it caught in mid-air by a blonde charging straight from him.
"Shots fired! Shots fired!" Kolwalski screamed into his radio. "Back up! We need back up!" Several blocks away, his daughter, Abby Kowalski of Internal Affairs heard the calls, spun her car around and went speeding to her father's rescue. One of the upstairs apartments exploded with a flash grenade, and then out the side of his eye, he saw one of the shooters flung off the balcony and a bent rifle landing and skidding toward him. Right on top of him, two more gunmen were slammed together and tossed off the balcony. A blue blur was rushing just over their heads on the balcony, tossing men with guns and damaged rifles in different directions. Elliot Reid blinked and looked again. As he watched, one crazy redneck turned to shoot his blonde attacker, was punched fast and hard twice to the chest and tossed off to the police into the hard concrete from twelve feet over it.
"But that's impossible…" He watched as one by one the terrorist group was getting taken out by a blonde in a trick-or-treat costume moving at nearly the speed of light. Rossi and Morgan from the BAU were turning around trying to keep up with her image speeding by over him. Anyone who wasn't a police officer was flying off the second floor of the hotel and landing in the courtyard after getting struck with their weapon or violently punched to the chest with the force of a two hundred pound bag of flour. Reid had publicly denied the existence of this girl for five years since her first appearance in Detroit, and now, he was humbled in her presence. Forty-three members of the anti-government terrorist group were taken out in less than a minute, fifty-two automatic weapons were bent into scrap metal around the Chicago Police Department and Haggerty himself was tossed through his main floor apartment with his underwear pulled over his head and ponytail tied into a gag in his mouth. Rossi stood over him gun drawn to arrest him; Haggerty's supporters were lying around him with broken bones and concussions fighting to breath as they were arrested. Reid's jaw hung open as he watched Bridget streaking away up into the light blue sky and vanishing into the south sky. As she approached the St. Louis, Missouri, the captivating blonde heard a chirping from close to her ear. One arm balanced on the southern hemisphere, she tapped on her cell phone and placed a phone bud to her left ear.
"Talk to me…" She spoke.
"Hi, Penny…" Bernadette's perky cartoon voice spoke from her Pasadena apartment. "How you doing?"
"Just flying around…" Bridget grinned at the double meaning of the phrase.
"What?" All Bernadette heard was white noise and turbulence. It sounded as if the girl she knew as Penny Parker was driving on the freeway in a convertible with the roof down on the car. "I can't hear you."
"Hang on…" Bridget stopped in the air space over the corner of Northeast Oklahoma. As she appeared in the radar of nearby McClellan Air Base, flight recorders suddenly picked her up on satellite and lost her as she dove upward into the atmosphere. A few more minutes and satellite imaging computers would be trying to take pictures of her. The last time they started tracking her, they got as closed as fifteen feet and got a red and blue blob with a smaller blonde orb as her psychic aura disrupted their photographic technology. Bernadette meanwhile scowled with adorable confusion and looked to Howard with her in her apartment. Her eyes rolled with perplexed disarray, and her dainty red lips contorted into a perturbed scowl. Howard noticed her distress.
"What's the matter?" He asked.
"Sounds like she in the wind tunnel at the university." She answered and held the phone up to Howard as the crackling and popping inference around Penny reached a crescendo and slowly died away as Bridget reached the dark blue and light violet region of the atmosphere between the clouds and outer space. Most ground radar systems didn't reach this high, but nearly all the military satellites could find her within five minutes. Leveling off, Bridget hesitated in hover status and cupped her left hand over her ear bud.
"What's up?" Bridget responded.
"Oh…" Bernadette replaced her cell phone to her ear. "I was wondering if you and Leonard would like to join Howard and I on a double date with us. We were going to see the new Tom Cruise movie and maybe catch dinner."
"Sounds great…" The last time Bridget tried to date Leonard she was interrupted by a shoot-out in Los Angeles. "But… uh…" She paused to mentally discern anything that demanded her attention from future events. "Did you ask Leonard if he's available?"
"He's breaking out his new cologne as we speak." Bernadette impishly nodded her head in excitement with an anxious delighted grin rushing to her cheeks.
"I'll be there." Penny tapped off her phone on her belt and removed her ear bud as she dived to earth to reach nearly sub-sonic speeds in the atmosphere. A blast of noise crackled over Bernadette's phone suddenly that distracted Howard before switching itself off. He looked up from the explosion of noise to his girlfriend.
"What kind of car is she driving?" Bernadette asked out loud.
"Sounds like she's trying to wedge the space shuttle into the McDonald's drive-thru." Howard mumbled with a light chuckle. A quarter of the country away, Bridget once again escaped the United States Military from capturing her existence on radar. Over north Texas, Dallas councilwoman Sue Ellen Sheppard, the ex-wife of former oil baron J.R. Ewing casually glanced out the window of her small charter plane and then looked again as Bridget dipped down from over her and vanished into the clouds below her.
In the small prairie community of Drum Ridge ear Tucumcari, New Mexico, two Iowa pickers named Mike and Frank were picking through the antique toy collection of Walton Toplinger on his horse farm. Mike reached in and found a vintage Supergirl figure from the Seventies just as Bridget streaked through the northern sky over the ranch. All three of their heads turned in unison to the sight of her, but Mike and Frank looked at each and just shrugged it off.
In Phoenix, Arizona, former waitress Vera Gorman-Novak sat in the park and waited to reunite with her old friend, Alice Hyatt, in the old park. The two of them had once worked at the old Mel's Diner out on Grand Avenue near the highway, but the site was long gone, and Alice and Vera always got together and talked about the old days as Alice's musical repertoire came through the area. Briefly looking up, Vera noticed the distant red streak of a blonde soaring from east to west in the distance within a few seconds and stood surprised. Her fifteen-year-old son, Kenny, was right! There was a real superhero in the world, and she was not the only one to see her.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, police detective Grace Hanadarko pushed another perp into a mailbox and cuffed him before shoving Lionel Favreau into a police car. The nineteen-year-old Mexican-African American pimp and narcotics dealer was wanted in questioning for the street side shooting and murder of a prostitute named Brandy White, known on the street as White Chocolate. Pushed against the mailbox, his head just happened to look up and see Bridget flying over the city and then vanishing to the west. Grace must have seen her too because she told Favreau that Bridget was going to return and beat him up if he didn't tell her what he knew in the murder of the prostitute.
Outside Gold and Silver Pawn in Las Vegas, pawn broker Rick Harrison and his employee, Austin Russell, were looking over a vintage 1959 azure blue Ford sedan from the garage of Blake Atwater. Blake's brother, Ty, had restored the car and left it to him, but now, he just wanted what it was worth. As he and Rick dickered and negotiated the price of the car, the skies were cleaved by the presence of the maiden of might passing from east to west nearly right over the street. Bridget had banked north toward the city to hold her speed around a storm in the California Sierra Madre and then resume her course southwesterly for Pasadena, Upon seeing her, Rick cursed himself for not getting a picture of her in flight, but Austin "Chumley" Russell just grinned lackadaisically and referenced her as his girlfriend. It wasn't true, but who was going to believe him.
Bridget had just passed Barstow, California and was nearing the northern climbs of the greater Los Angeles area as a million sounds started invading her senses. One by one, the sounds of the large metropolitan city were getting sorted and ignored through her mind. A million noises at once ranging from voices, sirens, cars, conversations, engines and machines humming, dogs barking, radios, TV signals, ambient noises, white noises, all of them either getting passed or briefly acknowledged by her higher brain functions. Among them, the sound of someone in emotional torment attracted her interest. She was just eighty miles from her apartment. Who was crying and blubbering the name of her public identity with such emotional intensity?
"Please don't be Lily." Jackson Stewart sat on the roof outside his bedroom of his Malibu ranch house. "Please don't be Lily…" His face was red. His eyes were puffy. Since his sister's dorky best friend convinced him that she was really his superhuman infatuation, he had gone from disbelief to anger and now complete depression. He had to know the truth. He couldn't even go into the Supergirl chat rooms and look at the new photos coming in because all he saw was Lily's face in them. He never really liked that girl. He tolerated her in small doses, but she was practically his other little sister, and having her ruin his infatuation was the cruelest blow since Miley and Lily revealed to his classmates he used to carry a Monkees lunch box to school.
"Supergirl, where are you?" Jackson scanned the skies around the house once more. "Please don't be Lily."
Inside the house, his father, Robby Ray Stewart, looked at Miley and Lily sitting and grinning on the sofa over their prank. Robby feared he'd have to go up on the roof and try and pull Jackson back down.
"Please don't be Lily…" Jackson wailed once more.
"For the love of God, Jackson, please get a life." Bridget stepped on to the roof behind Jackson and leaned on the chimney. Jerking his head around, Jackson reacted suddenly and started sliding off the roof just as Bridget knelt and grabbed him by the top of his pants and pulled him up to sit next to her feet on the top of the roof. His eyes blinked and blinked again, his jaw dropped and he forgot anyone named Lily ever existed. She was real, and she was more beautiful in person than he ever thought.
Why did all the newspapers claim she resembled Reese Witherspoon?
"Look, sweetie…" Bridget lightly grinned and patted his back to comfort him. "Lily doesn't get a lot of recognition being in your sister's Hannah Montana shadow. Every once in a while, she needs to do something to make herself feel special."
"You know my sister's Hannah Montana?!"
"Well, yeah…" Bridget postured a bit. "Look, I know she annoys you, but let her have this. Come on, get off the roof and go get a girlfriend... A real one..."
"I want you!" Jackson struggled to stand up on the roof with the winds off the coast threatening to blow him off. He could seen miles of the wooded property and grounds beyond, but all he wanted to do was be with Bridget as she levitated up and off the roof of his house in the empty space over the front yard. "Please… be my girlfriend!" He reached out to her. "Let's go out on a date…"
Bridget grinned and chuckled a bit and admired his plucky determination.
"Oh, sweetie…" Grinning at his hero worship, Bridget began levitating high off the roof and drifting off of it. "Look, you're cute, but this job is 24/7… I barely get a chance to eat lunch…"
"Jackson!" Robby Ray stepped out of the house to yell at his son to get off the roof, then slowly dropped his jaw to see Bridget in her red, blue and yellow wave good-bye to him and lift off toward Pasadena.