The Last Guardian (Ch. 2)

( Every character in this story is a legal adult over the age of 18 )

The Last Guardian

Chapter 2

Harry hovered above the outskirts of Smallville, Kansas, invisible to anyone looking up. He held still. The only thing moving was the sound. He heard wind rustling against the water tower, a steady hum from the feedlot west of town, and a few cars on Main Street. The town spread out below him, pockmarked with streetlights and brightly lit windows. Even from up here, he could smell the difference between the two gas stations. The gas in one smelled cheaper … a little more sulfurous. The other had cleaner bathrooms.

He drifted lower, slipping through the air with easy, lazy loops. Down the center of Main, there was an old-timey movie theater that was boarded up. There was a bowling alley with a plastic sign shaped like a bowling pin, and a diner with a hand-painted window reading, "All Day Breakfast." There were a few other shops dotted along the largest street in the small town, but nothing worth noting. 

The sun had been down for an hour, and the temperature had cooled. At this hour, pretty much everyone had gone home. Only three cars moved … a beat-up old F-150, a sheriff’s cruiser with a cracked windshield, and a battered Chrysler minivan with a Smallville Crows bumper sticker. Nobody noticed him invisibly floating above the post office.

He set down in a narrow alley behind the bowling alley. His trainers scuffed the gravel. The brick walls sweated out a smell that made Harry’s nose wrinkle. He could instantly tell what it was. It was a mixture of decades of cigarette smoke and the scent of stale piss. A single bare bulb above a metal door lit the alley in a dull glow. Harry made himself visible again. 

Surprisingly, Harry wasn’t hungry even though he hadn’t eaten all day. No, he was more mentally tired than anything, and all he wanted was to rest for a while. Unfortunately, with no money, his options were limited. It was fine, though. He planned to rest here in the alley for the night and figure out what to do in the morning. He moved further away from the foul smell and slid down the brick wall. 

Harry leaned back against the wall of the alley and closed his eyes. Even pressed against the brick wall and sitting on the hard ground, his body didn’t feel it. Distant thunder made him look up at the dark sky. Harry could see lightning flashing high in the dark clouds, and he knew a storm was well on its way. He ignored the thunder and listened to the night with his improved hearing. He could hear soft footsteps as a raccoon explored a tipped-over garbage can two alleys over. He heard the gentle thump of a stereo from a basement window and the steady clicks of an old man playing solitaire at his kitchen table. The town was loud in its own small way, though he doubted if anyone else could hear it.

Just as he was beginning to calm down, the tingle returned at the base of his skull. He rubbed it, expecting the sensation to go away, but it only grew. Harry took a slow breath and let his mind drift, trying to pinpoint the cause. He reached out, feeling the pressure build.

There were minds everywhere. Each was a slight noise, but together they were quite loud. Harry sorted them without much effort, scanning for anything that felt wrong. He found it almost immediately. There was a cluster of minds, all bunched together, pulsing with terror. Harry's eyes snapped open.

He focused on the voices. At first, it was chaos. Screaming, crying, prayers spoken under ragged breaths. Then, as he concentrated, the background noise fell away. Harry saw the scene in perfect clarity, as if he were there. An airplane high above was flying through a storm. It was in a free fall, and alarms were shrieking in the cockpit. Harry could practically taste their fear.

"Shit," Harry said, and bolted to his feet. He reached for the sensation, looking for a heading, a distance, anything useful. The minds on the plane were moving fast … falling. Without thinking twice, he slightly bent his knees and rocketed straight up into the sky. 

The Last Guardian

Lana Lang sat in row seventeen, a window to her left, some guy in a fleece vest to her right. She pressed her forehead against the cool plexiglass. Outside was the blackest night she had ever seen. Lightning pierced the sky all around them, momentarily brightening the massive wing of the plane. 

She was supposed to sleep. The second leg of her flight, Atlanta to Metropolis International, had left late, and she’d already lost a night to jetlag and the endless bluster of Charles de Gaulle’s departure hall. The airline-provided pillow provided almost no comfort. Her blanket, polyester and thinner than a t-shirt, sat bunched around her neck. She couldn’t sleep.

The man behind her, who looked like a balding insurance adjuster, snored with comic violence. He sounded like someone drowning a pig in a bathtub. Every minute or so, he’d rattle himself awake, snort, then drift right back into it, his mouth gaping open. 

Lana tried earplugs, but they didn’t help. She switched to music, but the tinny earbuds from the amenity kit did nothing against the snorer. She gave up and listened to her own thoughts. She imagined a warm, manly set of hands on her scalp, kneading her temples with the gentle pressure. She wondered what Clark was doing right now. He was probably sleeping better than anyone on this flight. He would laugh at the snorer, and so would Chloe. Even Pete would find a way to make it funny.

“Can I get you a drink?” The flight attendant leaned over, her face puffy and tired. The skin beneath her eyes was slightly dark, probably from working too many hours.

Lana nodded her head and managed a polite smile. “Could I have some water?”

The woman poured her a cup, and carefully handed it to her. Lana drank it down. Her mouth tasted stale from the airline coffee and recycled air. Somewhere up front, a baby started to cry. Lana tried not to get annoyed. The baby was just as exhausted as she was. She took slow breaths and visualized her heartbeat slowing. She counted backwards from one hundred, letting the numbers form and dissolve on the inside of her eyelids.

The plane shuddered, not hard, but just enough to make the plastic cup vibrate. Lana glanced out the window, but there was only darkness, lightning, and rain. She told herself it was nothing. She’d flown this route before. Summer storms over Kansas were routine.

The seatbelt sign came on. The cabin lights dimmed and then flared back up. There was an announcement asking them to remain in their seats and keep their belts fastened. They were running into some turbulence. People muttered and shifted in their seats. She heard the snorer behind her wake up, cough, and say, “Goddamn.”

Lana clicked her belt. She did it a little faster and tighter than necessary. She tugged it twice to make sure it was secure. The man next to her did not. He grunted and left his belt hanging, absently playing Tetris on his phone.

The turbulence hit again, this time hard enough to make the cup in her hand jump. The plane dropped, then rebounded. Someone screamed, high-pitched and then silent. Luggage bins popped open overhead, and a few carry-ons spilled into the aisle. The flight attendants stumbled, grasped for the seatbacks, and barked instructions to stay seated. Lana’s head smacked the window. Her first thought was to check for blood, but she felt nothing wet. Her teeth ached from where they’d snapped together.

A series of pops and thuds came from above, like something throwing rocks against a sheet metal roof. Something banged the top of the fuselage, then another, louder crash. The snorer behind her started to whimper, and then he was praying, not quietly. Hail. It had to be hail, Lana thought.

Lana gripped her armrests until her knuckles turned white. Her heartbeat was racing. The overhead lights flickered. For a moment, the whole plane was dark except for the glow of reading lamps and cellular phones. Then the lights came back, twice as bright, and she blinked away the dots dancing in her vision. The captain’s voice came on, rushed and too loud. “Flight crew, take your seats immediately. Everyone, remain buckled, remain calm. We are encountering severe weather. Please …”

The rest was cut off by another wave of turbulence, this one much worse. The aircraft jerked violently to the left, then righted itself with a teeth-grinding groan. It felt as if a giant hand had picked up the plane and tried to wring it out. Several people behind her vomited. She smelled it before she heard it, an acid tang that filled the cabin. The crying baby shrieked, and Lana braced her feet against the floor and sucked in air, desperately trying to keep from hyperventilating. There was a moment where everything seemed suspended … noise, motion, even the growl of the engines. The plane held itself together for one last, momentary heartbeat. Then her world went insane.

The plane dropped. It wasn’t like before … just a shudder. No, it was a freefall, a vertical plunge. The ceiling and floor switched places. Her stomach crushed itself against her lungs. She screamed, and so did everyone else. It was a chorus of hysteria that merged into a single wordless howl. The man next to her reached for her hand, but missed. His phone pinwheeled into the aisle and vanished. He clawed at the air and started to cry, gasping in jagged breaths.

There was a bang. A colossal, impossible bang that rattled her bones flooded her body with terror.

The cabin seemed to invert, bowing and flexing in impossible ways. The air was full of objects … magazines, bags, a child’s stuffed rabbit, hundreds of tiny things all tumbling through the cabin. She heard metal screeching, and then another sound. It was deeper and possibly more frightening … a snap, like the breaking of bone.

The jet began to spin. It wasn’t a gentle spiral, but a sickening, out-of-control rotation. The g-forces pinned her to her seat. Her face felt stretched, like her skin was about to peel off. Lana couldn’t even lift her hands from the armrests. She forced her eyes open. She saw people upside down, right side up, and sideways, all at once. Their faces were frozen in mask-like expressions of terror and disbelief. She managed to turn her head. Through the window, she saw nothing but shards of metal and fire, flickering past so fast they became one continuous smear.

The wing nearest to her had ripped off. All that was left was a jagged stump belching out a long streak of impossibly bright fire. Something hot and wet splattered her cheek. Lana wiped at it instinctively. It was blood. Whose, she couldn’t tell. The snorer behind her was silent now. She didn’t want to look.

Another bang made her scream louder than she ever had. This one caused the floor to buckle beneath her feet. The coldest wind she had ever felt pulled the air from her lungs and threatened to rip the hair straight from her scalp. She looked over her shoulder and saw nothing but a gaping hole where the tail section used to be. It was gone. She thought, in a strange moment of clarity, that she’d never see Aunt Nell again, never ride her horse, never get married. It was over. She almost felt relieved.

The air turned cold … not just normal cold, but vacuum cold. The frigid air was so sharp it made her teeth ache again. The last thing she heard was her own scream. Then the floor vanished, and she was ripped free, flying up and away and hurtling through darkness. Lana Lang knew that this was the end. 

The Last Guardian

Harry felt nothing but pure velocity and a raw sense of determination as he punched through the lower storm cloud. His eyes burned green as the world below shrank fast. Rain hammered his face and the wind made his clothes vibrate against his skin, but his body ignored it. He could smell the lightning and fire, and something else … uncontrollable fear. He kept rising.

The clouds were as dense as concrete, and inside, lightning turned the world white for a half-second. Thunder rattled his ears, and he saw the bolt come for him. It struck him in the chest and threw him into a flat spin. The pain was sharp, but Harry absorbed it, twisted his body, and forced himself upright. He couldn’t help but grin. This was the first time he truly got to test his new powers. His shirt was a smoldering wreck, but one quick thought from him fixed that. 

He burst out of the cloud and kept going, higher and higher, pushing against the force that so desperately tried to keep his feet on the ground. The temperature dropped dramatically. Hail the size of cricket balls stung his arms and face. He could see the hail smashing against his skin, but he could barely feel it. The hail shattered against his head, leaving icy slush on his eyebrows. He laughed, feeling the surge of adrenaline that always came during one of his crazy adventures. 

The noise in his head grew sharper. He heard the hundreds of minds full of panic and chaos braided together. He looked and found the source instantly.

There was a passenger jet above, no more than a few seconds away. It tumbled nose-down, and Harry could see the ripples in the metal along the fuselage. He blinked, and his vision magnified. He could easily see the skin of the plane. The elevators on the tail were heavily damaged. In the cockpit, two pilots fought the controls, sweating and crying out. Through the windows of the cabin, he could see oxygen masks pinned to the ceiling and dozens of people screaming.

Harry took aim, leaned forward, and flattened his body into a dart. He accelerated, leaving a green vapor behind him. The storm tried to stop him, but he was built for this. He was built to break through.

At five miles out, the jet lost a wing. The left side detached with a sound so loud Harry could feel it in his bones. The stub spat fire and a black smear of fuel. The whole aircraft rolled once, then began to come apart.

A chunk of debris tumbled end over end through the air. A row of seats, still attached to the floor, peeled away like a scab. He saw people in the row … some limp, some flailing. Another seat, separate from the others, twisted away. A young woman with dark hair was awake and aware, and even as she hurtled into the sky, she never let go of the armrest. She vanished behind the spinning, detached tail.

Harry felt her terror in the noise of the storm. He changed course, hard. The g-force would have liquified him once, but now it felt like a slight strain on his muscles. He reached her, caught up with the falling seat, and grabbed the back of her chair with both hands. The force almost tore it from his grasp. He reached around her and felt for the belt. 

Her name burned through his mind … Lana Lang. It was like her entire life had flashed through her mind in those few seconds, and she screamed as he crushed the seatbelt buckle in one hand and let the metal frame drop. The wind twisted her long, dark hair around his neck. She was shivering, mouth open but unable to speak. He didn’t have time to comfort her. Instead, he enveloped her in his green power to keep her warm and safe. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and they were suddenly one moving as one, falling and spinning toward the wreckage. 

Below them, the rest of the plane was breaking apart. The cockpit fell away. Dozens of human bodies pinwheeled through the blackness. Harry heard every heartbeat, every scream, every thought. It was too much to process, so he focused on one thing … saving them.

He gathered his willpower, just as he had with the dirt in the field. Only this time, it was heavier and much harder. He put out his left hand, fingers splayed. The ring inside him burned, and he felt it climb up his arm. The green light turned blinding. He aimed at the spinning pieces of the plane, the loose rows of seats, and the cargo tumbling behind.

Every piece jerked to a halt, frozen in the air as if time itself had seized up. The green light wrapped every shard, every person, every seat. Lana clung to him so hard he could feel her nails digging into his skin.

Harry willed the debris together. It was slow at first, then he put more will behind it, and the pieces moved with speed, slotting back into place. The cockpit sealed to the front. The torn fuselage wound itself shut, smooth as silk. The wings reattached, and the fire snuffed out as the fuel lines fused together. Every human who had been ejected from their seat or torn loose from the aisle floated gently back to their place. It took less than three seconds. When it was done, the entire jet hovered in the air, green light throbbing around it like a second skin.

Harry shifted Lana into both arms and cradled her. She was still shaking, but alive. He hovered beside the jet, then reached out and touched the metal underbelly. He felt the cold and the vibration of the passengers inside. He thought, "Fly," and the jet began to descend.

He guided it, slow at first, then faster as he grew confident. The storm gave way to clear sky below. The plane descended, engines still dead, and glided on a sheet of Harry’s green power. Harry and Lana floated beside it, unbothered by the speed. Down below, the lights of Smallville grew closer, then the flat black line of a highway, and then the green squares of cornfields.

He steered the jet toward an empty stretch of road. There were no cars, just blacktop and the distant glow of city lights. Harry slowed the jet as they neared the ground. He found it slightly amusing that the pilots dropped the landing gear just in time for the plane to be smoothly set on the ground. He set it down so softly that the tires barely squeaked. The emergency slides popped. People poured out as fast as they could, falling to their knees and crying on the road. It was a reasonable response, Harry figured. At least no one was dead. Even the pilots stumbled down the stairs, shaking and pale but alive.

Harry set Lana down gently beside the highway, away from the crowds. She tried to speak, but nothing came out. He brushed the hair out of her eyes and examined her forehead. It was wet and sticky with blood that wasn’t hers. He let his hand rest on her shoulder until she stopped trembling.

She looked at him, at the impossible color of his eyes, and whispered, “What are you?”

Harry smiled kindly, wiped the rain from his face, and said, “Just someone with a saving-people-thing … or so I’ve been told.”

Lana stared, then started to laugh. It was one of those unnerving, hysterical laughs that only occur when you survive some horrible event. Harry heard sirens in the distance. They were getting closer by the second. That was his cue to leave. “Sorry, but I’ve got to go. I really don’t want anyone to know about me,” he told her, but she wasn’t going to let him get away that easily. Her hand gripped his wrist with surprising strength. 

“Can I see you again?” she asked with utmost seriousness. Harry froze for a second and thought about it. He was alone with nothing to his name. It would be nice to have a friend. He slowly nodded his head, and Lana breathed a sigh of relief. The grip on his wrist loosened, and when he took a step back, Lana took a step forward. “Will you meet me tomorrow?” she asked quietly, her eyes wide and innocent. Again, Harry nodded, and Lana gave him a shaky smile. She was obviously still traumatized by what had just happened. “I live in Smallville. Can you meet me tomorrow night in front of the Talon … nine o’clock?” she asked one last time. 

“I’ll be there,” Harry promised. By then, the sirens were very close, so Harry ducked into a nearby cornfield and made himself invisible. He watched for a while as police, ambulances, firetrucks, and finally news crews arrived in mass. Just by listening closely, he discovered that several people were badly injured, and many more had various minor injuries. From what he heard, it was hopeful that everyone would eventually make a full recovery. Harry watched as Lana was looked over. She had a few scrapes and bruises, but other than that, she was given a clean bill of health. Eventually, she was shuttled away to wherever they were taking her. Once she was gone, Harry flew invisibly back into town and settled in his quiet spot in the alley. He sat back down in his spot and went over everything in his mind. 

He couldn’t deny that he had felt an incredible rush. It was a feeling of excitement, adventure, and the innate sense that you had done something good. His entire body was still tingling from the excitement, and he found it difficult to close his eyes and rest. ‘Maybe this is what I was brought here for,’ Harry told himself. Upon finishing his thought, he could tell that whatever the power was that was now inside of him, agreed with his sentiment. 

Harry took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Slowly, his eyes closed, and his mind was able to rest.