Footsoldiers: A Super Human Clash Special From Philomel Books Read online

  I couldn’t understand what was wrong with everyone. OK, so I was huge and blue and probably looked quite scary, but I still hadn’t actually done anything bad. What had happened with Pastor Cullen was an accident—why couldn’t they understand that? If I were a bad guy, wouldn’t I have done more? Wouldn’t I have attacked the cops when they shot at me?

  But this was years before I’d heard of the “arachnid response,” the automatic reaction a lot of people have to spiders: They react with fear and revulsion even when they know the spider isn’t dangerous. That was what was happening here: They were just terrified of me.

  Turning to face the tank again, I yelled, “No way was that ten seconds!”

  And then I heard the helicopters.

  Three of them, swooping in low over the town, heading straight for the church.

  Behind me, all the soldiers and cops and FBI guys were spilling out through the doorway, running like the devil was chasing them.

  Ahead, the rest of the cops and the army were pulling back—even the tank had shifted into reverse and was moving in a hurry. It clipped the edge of a parked car and then drove right back over the top of another, flattening it.

  Twin streaks of fire erupted from the lead copter, and the concrete in front of me was ripped to shreds.

  I did the only sane thing I could do: I turned and ran.

  With the copter’s bullets strafing the ground all around me, I raced around to the back of the church and kept going through the rear parking lot.

  The back wall was about fifteen feet high. I jumped for it, expecting to grab the top and pull myself up. Instead I soared much higher, cleared the wall by a good three feet, and came down so hard in the field behind it that I sank to my knees in the dirt.

  But even that didn’t slow me much: I surged through the soil as easily as someone running through a shallow pond.

  I knew the town well, of course. There’s hardly a twelve-year-old kid in the world who doesn’t know every secret nook and cranny in his hometown. I knew the shortcuts through the housing estates, the barely visible paths through the woods. And I knew the caves: That’s where I was heading.

  Back in the church, Harmony Yuan had mentioned thermal scanners. I’d watched enough cop shows and read enough comic books to know what they were: cameras that detected heat instead of light. And I knew that someone of my size would be giving off a lot of heat—more than enough for them to be able to track me.

  But not in the caves, I was sure. The caves were old and huge and went on for miles. And some of them held deep lakes where, according to the guide when my elementary class was there on a field trip, the temperature was the same all year-round. That would be the perfect place to hide.

  All right, God, I prayed. If you’re not going to change me back, at least let me get away from these guys!

  In some respects, that was a clever plan. For a twelve-year-old. But, being only twelve, I hadn’t quite learned how to think everything through. Sure, immersing myself in the underground lake masked my heat signature, but it didn’t occur to me that the soldiers would simply start looking in the place where the heat signature had suddenly disappeared.

  They tracked me, they found me, and they caught me.

  When I was about six or seven, Pa saw me kneeling beside my bed praying for a new bike. He’d picked me up, and sat down on the bed with me on his lap. He said, “The thing about prayer, son . . . Well, it doesn’t work like that.”

  I said, “But Ma said that God answers every prayer!”

  “Yeah, that’s right, Gethin. He does. But, sometimes, the answer is no.”

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CARROLL

  The Quantum Prophecy Trilogy

  The Awakening

  The Gathering

  The Reckoning

  Super Human

  The Ascension

  Stronger